By Pam Janis
Two hundred fifty years ago, tempers flared in families and among neighbors as those loyal to King George sparred with rebels determined to birth a new country.
No one felt the conflict more acutely than the 35-year-old rector of Rye’s Grace Church, the Rev. Ephraim Putnam Avery.
Being the rector in a Church of England parish required you to take an oath of loyalty to the king. Even if Avery had wanted to switch sides — and there’s no indication he did — his job demanded that he stay loyal to his royal. He was outspoken about it and quickly became a target for tormentors.
He was killed on Nov. 5, 1776 — or was he?
What happened that day could have been the crime junkie podcast of its time.
Here’s what we know:
The Battle of White Plains had taken place eight days earlier, on Oct. 28. The British, under Gen. William Howe, attacked Gen. George Washington’s Continental Army. The Americans had to retreat, and everybody, Loyalists and rebels alike, was on edge.
Avery had already had a terrible year. He suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. Then his wife, Hannah, died. He was now the single parent to six young children. He was said to be despondent.
On the day he died, Patriot troops burned down White Plains. Although the major who led the rampage was ultimately court-martialed, a battle line had been crossed: Americans had torched an American town.
Avery’s body was found that same day. He’d been shot and his throat slit. Some accounts say his body had been dragged into the Boston Post Road near the church. Others say it was found on a fence near the rectory.
Questions remain to this day: Was it murder or suicide? Who was so enraged by his political views that they would actually kill him? Was he so far in the depths of despair that he would kill himself and leave six orphans? Was it even possible to slit your own throat, especially with some effects of a stroke?
To add to the mystery, Avery’s stepfather, Israel Putnam, was not only a Patriot, he was George Washington’s major general. Would the Reverend’s seeming disloyalty to family have marked him in some way?
And, could there have been a Mr. Haim involved, possibly as the killer? An entry on findagrave.com says that’s who killed him.
For answers — or at least informed conjecture — we turned to Lear Beyer, local amateur historian and a key member of the Revolutionary Rye 250 Committee. His interest in Rye’s revolutionary-era history is two-fold: he has a passion for American history, and, it’s personal; several ancestors lived in Rye during this time.
“I had one relative who was actually in the French and Indian War,” Beyer said. “He was one of six brothers. He fought in the Revolution along with two of his brothers. The other three brothers were Loyalists. So I’m part of a divided family, and what I’ve learned through my research is that most local families were divided.”
Avery, born in Pomfret, Conn., graduated from Yale in 1761, and also attended King’s College, now Columbia University. He was ordained in England by the Bishop of London in 1765, when he was appointed to lead Grace Church in Rye, a town with a population of about 2,000.
Avery was close with an older Yale grad, Samuel Seabury, the rector of a neighboring Westchester town parish. Seabury was one of the area’s most prolific Loyalists, writing and distributing pamphlets that promoted the benefits of loyalty to the king. He wrote under the pen name A.W. Farmer, meaning “A Westchester Farmer,” though he wasn’t one. (He was so well known that 240 years later he was a character in Broadway’s “Hamilton,” where he sang a song called “A Refuted Farmer,” which 18-year-old Alexander Hamilton rebutted, also in song. The diss includes Hamilton claiming, “My dog sings more eloquently than thee.”)
Seabury and another area Loyalist, William Lounsbury, worked to counteract the rebels and support New York’s Loyalist governor, William Tryon. Tryon, feeling unsafe in Manhattan, moved out onto a British ship in New York Harbor, protected by the British fleet. There he orchestrated ways to raise a Loyalist militia. In December of 1775, Lounsbury and others paid a visit to Tryon on his ship. They brought him a letter from Avery.
Without knowing the letter’s contents, Beyer said, “It seems pretty safe to say that Rev. Avery was sharing intelligence with Governor Tryon. Seabury was known to be providing information to both the British and Tryon. There was a little network.”
Patriot sympathizers harassed the Loyalists constantly. They stole Avery’s horses, vandalized his farm and stole his grain. Then, on the night of Nov. 5, they trashed White Plains.
So it would seem that Patriot marauders could be linked to Avery’s lifeless body that same day. And there could be meaning in it being Guy Fawkes Day in England, which rowdily celebrates the discovery and prevention of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and kill King James I.
In fact, Seabury wrote to the Secretary of England’s Gospel Propagation Society, “We are very confident that he was murdered by the rebels.”
But others believed that Avery, in despair over his health, his wife’s death, his repeated property losses and the burden of raising six young children, died by suicide.
Suicide? Could he have slit his own throat? According to medical sources, including the Journal of Trauma and Injury, that is unusual but possible. He was still functional after his stroke.
But what about his kids? He could already have had the plans in place to bring them to friends in Norwalk, where they did subsequently go.
What about the passing reference online to a Mr. Haim as the murderer? (We tried to contact the poster through the findagrave website, to no avail.) And was there really a Haim in Rye? Beyer doesn’t know about Haim.
Adding to the mystery, he said, is the paucity of information in Rye about its part in the Revolution, because it was largely a Loyalist town. There are no monuments dedicated to the war. There is no record of a public funeral or service for Reverend Avery. And though he and his wife were first buried in Rye’s old Milton Cemetery, she was moved to Greenwood Union.
“But they can’t find his remains,” Beyer said. “So, nobody knows whether he is actually buried there or not, but she is. There may even be a tombstone for him there, but they can’t find his body.”
So what are we to take away from the unsolved mystery of who killed Rev. Avery?
“It’s fascinating because it’s not so much a Rye story as it is an important historical story,” Beyer said. “We just assume that everyone back then was a patriot and supported independence. This demonstrates how complicated, divisive, and violent those early days of the Revolution actually were.
“Rev. Avery was a reflection of the [discord] across the broad community. He was also a civic leader of this town just doing his job.”
