John Richards Home, Site of

Another of the Court of Oyer and Terminer judges who lived in Boston, but who is rarely seen in the Salem witch trials documents is John Richards. He was well-connected to the rich and powerful and was a self-made man of wealth himself. His participation appears largely as a confidant and advisor to those involved with the trials, most notably Rev. Cotton Mather, with whom there was a correspondence. Richards was a parishioner and notable patron of the Second Church, also known as the Mathers’ Church.

When Richards was appointed to the witch trials court, Cotton Mather shared his thoughts about how to proceed, advising Richards to be careful about relying only on spectral evidence and, while not advocating torture, suggesting “cross and swift questions” would create confusion among the accused, leading to confession. Once the Court of Oyer and Terminer was terminated at the end of 1692, Richards was appointed to the Superior Court of Judicature that followed.

The English-born Richards may have arrived in Boston in the position of a servant, but worked his way up to the merchant class. He was admitted into the Puritan church in 1664, was a captain in the militia, served in King Philip’s War, was Harvard College treasurer from 1672-85, and was the Speaker of the House in the Massachusetts legislature. He was also the largest contributor to the salaries of the Mathers at the Second Church, and when the fire of 1676 destroyed Increase Mather’s house (as well as the Second Church and more than 40 other North End buildings), Richards put the family up at his own North End home, until a new house was built for the Mathers on Hanover Street. When Rev. Cotton Mather married in 1686, it was Richards who officiated. Richards’s first wife was a cousin of another Oyer and Terminer magistrate, Wait-Still Winthrop, while his second wife was Winthrop’s sister.

In 1694, according to the diary of Judge Samuel Sewall, John Richards died suddenly and unexpectedly, at the age of 50. Reportedly, “…falling into an angry passion with his Servant Richard Frame, presently after, fell probably into a Fit of Apoplexy, and died.”

The site of John Richards property is today Harris Street, east off of Hanover Street, next to St. Stephen’s Catholic Church (once the location of the New North Church) and almost opposite Paul Revere Mall. In Richards’s time, it was sometimes called “the lane that runneth up by the land of John Richards,” and had various names until 1868 when it became Harris Street.