>> New England may not be known as the most fertile farmland, but it is a place where the determined can take root and grow.

We're not just talking about crops, we're talking about legends as well.

Some grow above ground, like the site of New England's first Christmas tree.

>> It seems he became somewhat homesick and wanted to practice a Christmas time tradition that was common in his homeland.

That celebration was of the one thing that stays green throughout the year and offers hope in the cold, dark winter days.

>> And still other legends burrow beneath the ground where we'll explore the bizarre afterlife of Rhode Island founder Roger Williams.

>> When I was a kid in elementary school, I had heard about this story, about this tree root actually punching through a coffin and wrapping around the body down the spine, cutting out at the pelvis and then down to the legs and feet.

>> We're digging for stories that take root and grow on this episode of New England Legends.

Legends.

Myths.

Folklore.

New England is a land of history and mystery.

From our shorelines to our mountains and everywhere in between.

Tales of the strange, the supernatural and the bizarre have always been part of life here.

Are these just stories heard round the campfire, or is there some truth to these tales?

Let's find out as we explore these New England legends.

One of my favorite things about the fall in New England is apple picking.

Now, like a legend, apple trees need sunlight and good soil and nutrients from that soil.

But this isn't really a story about apples.

This legend is about the founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams.

You can't hardly turn your head in Providence, Rhode Island without seeing the name Roger Williams.

Roger Williams Park, Roger Williams University.

There's the Roger Williams memorial.

It's clear that Providence, Rhode Island, thinks pretty highly of this man.

But it wasn't always that way.

In fact, by the time of his death, they didn't think much of Roger Williams at all.

It didn't even have a proper gravesite.

So how did we get here?

How did this great man fall and then rise up from the ashes to be so prominent?

And what happened to his mortal remains?

My quest starts here at the John Brown Museum in Providence, home to the Rhode Island Historical Society, an organization founded in 1822.

>> Roger Williams is trained as a minister, and he's trained as a minister in the Protestant tradition.

But at the time that he leaves his schooling, England is in the midst of religious turmoil and people are not able to worship as they so choose.

This has sent families fleeing England to other parts of Europe, and more recently had them forming colonies in what would become the United States.

So Roger Williams hears of a position in the new colonies in Massachusetts Bay, and he decides to follow those men, women and families that have already settled there.

>> And how is he received when he gets here?

>> People are delighted at his arrival.

They've recently lost their minister, who's going back to England.

They need a person in that role because the church is, of course, central and fundamental to their lives in the New World.

And so he is greeted with enthusiasm because he's widely known as being extraordinarily smart as well as devoutly religious.

And he is there, in his estimation, to lead this group of individuals who are interested in separating from the Church of England.

So they are elated with his arrival, and they know of his long standing friendships with people of influence and power.

And so they're very excited to have him there.

>> When do things start to go wrong in Massachusetts?

>> So pretty quickly.

Um, they are in the position of of offering him, uh, jobs, if you will.

And he declines.

>> We should offer you the post of teacher in this church.

We do so now.

This church, Boston, will be the largest in the Bay colony.

It will with God's blessing.

I cannot accept your offer.

You cannot accept the post.

>> Uh, what he sees on the ground there in Massachusetts and then later in Plymouth Bay and Salem is what he feels is a false kind of separation from the church.

While many people today think of Roger Williams, and they think he was banned for not being religious enough.

In fact, it's quite the opposite.

He takes separation very seriously, and he begins to question the leaders of the colonies.

>> The churches of the Bay colony.

Indeed they must be, since I have observed this one, are opposed to the mass and other such ceremonies.

Why, then, are ye not separated from the Church of England?

>> And then he begins to also question things like flying a British flag.

And this is where the leaders of the colony start to push back.

Because not only then is it a threat to their religion, they feel it's a threat to being able to continue their colony.

Because if they anger England and these are all English people and English citizens, they're afraid that they'll withdraw their consent to this colony and the support of this colony.

So he threatens in many ways their establishment and way of life.

And he begins moving throughout those colonies Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Salem, taking different positions.

And while doing that, he begins forming friendships with the indigenous communities.

So he is also learning their language.

>> So when things start to go wrong in Massachusetts, when they view him as too much of a threat, what does he do?

>> At first they they tell him, if you keep this up, we're going to have to intervene.

We're going to send you back to England.

And he knows that going back to England could mean a pretty hideous physical punishment.

People who are in England, who are religious dissenters, who are seen as heretics, can be jailed, hanged.

They're being branded.

Their noses could be cleaved.

So this is not a safe time to go back to England.

And he says, okay, okay.

But he seems to not be able to help himself.

And he keeps preaching and he keeps sharing his views because he feels it's his calling and his responsibility.

And ultimately they say, we're really sorry, but you're going to have to go.

>> It is plain, then, that nothing can turn you from your seditious intent.

Thus, there is but one course for the magistrates of this court to take.

Whereas master Roger Williams hath broached and divulged divers new and dangerous opinions against the authorities of magistrates, and maintain it the same without retraction.

It is therefore ordered that the said Master Williams shall depart and be banished forever out of the colony of Massachusetts.

>> So in the winter he actually leaves on foot and begins traveling south towards what would become Rhode Island.

>> And what are some of his ideas for this new community called Providence?

>> He brings with him this idea of the separation of church and state.

And it's a little bit different, perhaps, than what we think of.

But basically it is the idea that the church should be kept safe and protected from the messy civil world around it.

And so he wants that clear separation between the two.

And once, then people of all faiths and belief and of no faith to be allowed to live within this landscape.

That doesn't mean there was equality, but it means that you were not risking imprisonment, hanging, or a physical punishment for what you believed in.

So that was very fundamental.

He was also articulating forms of democracy and making statements about the fact that a government should be at the will of the people and should represent the desires of the people.

And when it doesn't, that government can be questioned.

>> So as his life goes on and he's moving into his later years, he has to witness things like the King Philip's War and horrible tragedies.

What was the end of his life like?

>> King Philip's War is a conflagration that covers all of New England, and this is devastating for all of these communities, for Rhode Island, for the colony, as well as and especially for the indigenous population.

And this is personally devastating for Roger Williams, as we know from his letters, because he considers the Narragansett to be his friends.

And so that was in the middle of the 1670s, and he dies in 1683.

>> Now let's talk about his death.

Where is he buried?

>> Like many people who have their houses along the waterfront in Providence, the families are buried on their properties, and many of them are buried at the point in the hill where it flattens in what is now Benefit Street.

And Roger Williams and his wife Mary were buried on their property.

But in fact, when they exhumed bodies and moved them to North Burial Ground to create Benefit Street, his body was not located among them.

And so his actual resting place was a bit of a mystery.

And so a number of people get together who are amateur archaeologists and historians, and they begin looking at documents, talking to families who might remember.

And they have heard that one of the ways to identify where the grave was was that there was an apple tree planted near this area.

Some accounts say it was between the house and the grave.

Others say it was between his grave and his wife's grave.

But nonetheless, there's an apple tree and there's a grave.

And so they begin digging in this process to exhume Roger Williams.

>> What do they find?

When they dig into the ground?

>> They find some fingernails, some hair, some teeth.

Uh, some, uh, what is sometimes referred to as greasy earth.

Uh, and they find an apple tree root.

>> An apple tree root?

>> Yes.

I like to play it out dramatically in my head.

Women gasp.

Men are taken aback because what they say they find is actually that the apple tree root grew through.

They believe, his decomposing body.

And so as the body decomposed, those that decomposition feeds the apple tree and it takes the shape of his torso.

It then splits into the two legs and then it curls up a little bit.

It was two feet.

Sort of like the Wicked Witch.

And so it becomes this story that they have, in fact, found Roger Williams, who has been, as is frequently said, eaten by this apple tree.

>> And what about that tree root?

Did they just discard it or.

>> No, no.

They lovingly remove it and take it and create a home for it and create a safe little coffin for it.

And so that it can be properly visited.

>> So this root can still be seen today at the John Brown Museum.

>> It can.

It's you can come on tour and you can visit the root and see if you think it's really Roger Williams.

>> The founder of Rhode Island, consumed by an apple tree.

And they kept the root that ran through his corpse.

Unbelievable.

I have to see this.

>> Hi.

I'm looking for a tree root related to Roger Williams.

Yeah, definitely.

We have it right in the back.

You want to follow me?

>> Wow.

This is the tree root that ate Roger Williams.

>> Well, to some, this is Roger Williams himself.

>> So the way it was described is this would, I guess, be the torso and the legs and the feet sticking out.

>> Coming right up.

So it would have ran through his body is what's believed.

>> And absorbed the nutrients that created an apple tree.

>> Exactly.

>> Wow.

And people come to the museum and they ask about this a lot.

>> So many people come to the museum.

They hear about it online.

I mean, when I was a kid in elementary school, I had heard about this story, about this tree root actually punching through a coffin and wrapping around the body down the spine, cutting out at the pelvis and then down to the legs and feet.

>> But I love that someone from the Rhode Island Historical Society thought to save this tree root.

Yeah, right.

More than 150 years ago.

And keep it and keep it to the point where it's now an attraction.

>> Definitely.

This is a major piece of history.

Again, so many people come here just to see this one stick.

I mean, I affectionately call it Old Raj.

So many times, just because people will come over.

They'll be descendants of Roger Williams, of which there are so many, uh, still today that come by looking to have some type of connection to, uh, their ancestor.

>> So besides what was interred at Prospect Place, this is all that remains of Roger Williams.

>> Well, actually, we do have another jar of what they believe to be have been the oily soil that they took from the gravesite of Roger Williams.

>> And is that something that you keep on display?

>> It's not something we keep on display.

We don't take it out for our general visitors, but we can make an arrangement for you today.

>> Oh, my God, I would love to see that.

>> Let's go get it out then.

>> So this is it.

This is the actual jar.

>> This is it here.

So let me start taking it out for you.

Okay.

And we do like to remember that we don't take this out for just anybody here.

>> Oh, wow.

So it looks almost like grey dust or charcoal or.

>> Yes.

So you can see here.

So now it is very very much dried out.

But originally this would have been that very oily soil where that denoted where a body had been decomposing in what was supposedly the grave of Roger Williams.

>> Is it okay to pick it up?>> Yes, please.

>> Yeah.

So this is the actual jar.

Wow.

And it says on here some of the supposed ashes of Roger Williams.

Monday morning, February 22nd, 1909.

>> At so many different time periods, they came back to this supposed grave site to try to make sure that they could have as much of what they believed to be Roger Williams as possible.

>> The tree root wasn't enough.

>> It wasn't.

>> One last question.

When you bite an apple off the tree.

Now, do you ever consider what might be underneath the ground of the tree?

>> I generally just thank Roger for his goodness.

>> The life of Roger Williams was colorful and storied, but by the time of his death he was all but forgotten in Rhode Island.

However, about a century later, his legend got a huge shot in the arm when his words and his ideas were used by the founders of the United States in writing the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

After that, Roger Williams became a Rhode Island icon.

But his afterlife got downright weird.

Check out these words from an 1860s newspaper article describing the exhumation of Roger Williams.

This route has occasioned much discussion, as the apples which grew on this tree were doubtless eaten by people in adjoining houses and by marauding boys, as is their custom.

It follows naturally that the essence of Roger Williams must have been absorbed by a multitude of people.

The conundrum has been propounded in the past by various local philosophers who ate Roger Williams.

How do you like them apples?

Did you ever see the movie Poltergeist?

They said the house was haunted because it was built on a cemetery where they had relocated the headstones, but not the graves.

But that would never happen in real life, would it?

The city of New London, Connecticut, is quaint.

It's pretty.

And it started as a cute little seaport.

And when they built it, they put the cemetery on the outskirts of town.

But over time, the outskirts weren't the outskirts anymore.

The city had encroached, buildings were being constructed.

And in 1885, Mayor Charles Williams decided, we've got to move this cemetery to make room for growth.

So we ponied up $8,000 of his own money and made an announcement.

If you'd like to remove your loved one and put them somewhere else, you're free to do so.

Otherwise the city will take care of the rest and put them in a cemetery about a mile away, further outside of town.

Well, 70 people took him up on the offer and moved their loved ones.

The rest were allegedly moved by the city.

Now, fast forward to 1938.

A hurricane blew through and uprooted a tree in Williams Park and with it some bones.

And they realized they didn't get every body that was below.

A few years later, when they had talked about putting in a civic arena on those grounds, it was decided you can't, because local witnesses who recalled the moving of the cemetery told them they moved about 700 headstones, but no graves.

When you walk in a cemetery, I feel like you can tell there's a hunger in the ground that it wants you, that this is your ultimate destination.

When you walk through Williams Park today, it's not just haunting, it's haunted.

Christmas time is special.

You could even say magical.

But there was a time when the holiday was outlawed in New England.

The Puritans who first settled here banned it all together.

They called the practice satanical.

And you'd be fine if you were caught practicing any sort of Christmas merriment.

It wasn't until Charles Dickens came to Boston and brought his incredible story, A Christmas Carol, that the idea of this holiday really took a foothold in both New England and America.

And oh, how times have changed since then.

We love Christmas now.

And more than that, we love to show off just how much we love it.

You'll find lights and decorations and celebration of the holiday season from November to January in every city, town and hamlet.

Shoot, this past year I saw decorations up in a few stores before Halloween.

Still, if decorating for the holidays was an Olympic sport, New England would be the gold medalist for sure.

But New England's first decoration, the very first Christmas tree to be put up here has its roots that go all the way back to the very founding of our country.

Our story begins in a quaint town in southern Vermont, where a monument marks a significant turning point in the history of the Revolutionary War.

>> April 19th, 1775 was actually the date of the beginning of our struggle for independence from Great Britain.

And by December of 1776, King George had pretty much had enough of the behavior of his colonies, and he wanted some definitive action.

Enter General John Burgoyne with his three point plan of attack, to separate the head from the body of this, uh, upstart birth of a new nation.

Now, John Stark, the hero of Bunker Hill, was approached to come out of his self-imposed retirement and help out at Bennington.

So he and Colonel Seth Warner meet right down at the Catamount Tavern to discuss plans of engagement.

>> General John Stark of Live Free or Die fame, led 2000 men into battle against British and German forces on August 16th, 1777, on a field in nearby Walloomsac, New York, about ten miles from Bennington.

The rebels defeated a detachment of British troops and their German allies, and while the victory at the Battle of Bennington helped energize support for American independence, the aftermath of that day left German and British forces with over 200 dead and 700 captured.

>> Now, of those 700 men that were captured, one was Hendrik Radmore.

Now, without a specific plan for dealing with such numbers of POWs.

The Americans were compelled to come up with an idea how to deal with all these people, and it was not an easy time for POWs, to be sure.

However, for some of the Brunswickers, a number of Brunswickers and Hessians, there was an offer made that if they put down their arms and refuse to raise arms against the country for the remainder of the war, they could begin a new life here in America.

These mercenaries realized, basically, that there was not much left for them back in the German lands that they came from.

America was wide open for settling, and many of them took them up on that offer.

So after spending a few more weeks in prison, they were indeed allowed to settle.

And one needs only look down the Hudson Valley corridor and the corridor from Connecticut to Boston to see the influence of these early settlers and names of communities, villages, businesses, etc., becoming part of the American mosaic or melting pot, as people call it, goes back much further than Ellis Island.

In fact, there are a number of people right in our area who can trace their roots back to that pivotal battle that was fought right in this region, the Battle of Bennington.

Now, what has the the summary of American Revolutionary War battle have to do with Christmas?

Recall Hendrick Rodman, the young man who was captured on that day.

Seems he wanted to practice a Christmas time tradition that was common in his homeland and share it with others.

Well, that celebration was of the one thing that stays green throughout the year and offers hope in the cold, dark winter days.

The ever green pine tree.

>> This is the spot in modern day Windsor Locks, Connecticut, where Hendrik Rodarmor once lived, in a little shack on Samuel Denslow's farm.

That wasn't a bad place to wait out the war.

Denslow treated him well enough.

But when December came, he found himself missing his family and friends.

Think about it.

He's thousands of miles from home.

He has no idea where his fellow soldiers ended up.

He's looking for some kind of comfort.

So he does something he used to do back home in Germany.

He cuts down a small evergreen tree.

He drags it inside the cabin and decorates the tree with ribbons, fabric and anything else he can find.

Sam Denslow sees the tree, shrugs his shoulders and figures.

This must be some strange foreign custom.

And he's not wrong.

But still, the idea seems a little absurd.

Here in Connecticut, trees belong outside.

But for Rathmore, it's a piece of home right here in the New World.

This odd winter tradition, carried out by one of America's earliest prisoners of war, would turn into the first decorated Christmas tree in New England.

So how do we know that this spot in Windsor Locks is the exact site of New England's first indoor decorated Christmas tree?

The short answer is we don't.

We do know it's pretty darn close to the exact point where Henry Moore once lived in a little cabin on Samuel Denslow's farm, because that was left behind in historical texts.

But there's nothing that says he actually put a tree up here in 1777.

Our only source is a 1955 Hartford Courant Newspaper Christmas Day edition that quotes an unnamed old timer as saying, hey, look, The Hessians used to put up Christmas trees indoors before anybody else.

He probably did too.

Today there's a tree.

There's that plaque, and there's a story.

If there's one thing I've learned in both legends in life, it's that belief makes things real.

I, for one, choose to believe.

Merry Christmas.

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