Sarah Maria Cornell

Sarah Maria Cornell (May 3, 1803 – December 20, 1832) was a Fall River, Massachusetts, mill worker whose corpse was found hanging from a stackpole on the farm of John Durfee in nearby Tiverton, Rhode Island on December 21, 1832. Her death was at first thought to be a suicide. After an autopsy, it was discovered she was pregnant. Methodist minister Ephraim K. Avery would be suspected of her pregnancy and tried for her murder, in a trial what would engage local industrialists against the New England Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Although Avery would be acquitted for the murder, he was forever scorned in the eyes of the public. Biography Sarah Maria Cornell was born on May 3, 1803, likely in Rupert, Vermont to James and Lucretia (Leffingwell) Cornell. Lucretia had been born well-off in an old Puritan family, the daughter of a Connecticut merchant and paper maker. However she had been disowned by her father after she married James Cornell, who had worked in his paper mill, and of whom he did not approve. James abandoned the family when Cornell was a baby, forcing her mother to give up her older sister and brother to relatives as she was financially unable to care for three children. Cornell remained with her mother to age eleven when she moved in with her aunt Joanna, in Norwich, Connecticut. Later in her teens, she apprenticed as a tailor. In 1820 she moved to nearby Bozrahville and worked as a tailor for about two years. Around 1822 or 1823 she went to work at a cotton mill in Killingly, Connecticut. In the years that followed, she would move often and work at various mills in Rhode Island and Connecticut, including stints in North Providence, Jewett City, Slatersville. During this period, Cornell often got into trouble, including charges of theft and other "inappropriate" acts for a woman of that time. During her time at Slatersville between 1823 and 1826, Cornell converted to Methodism, and sought to change her ways. However, in February 1826, the mill at Slatersville burned to the ground and she was forced to seek employment elsewhere. She first moved to the nearby village of Branch Factory and later to Mendon Mills (later called Millville, Massachusetts), several miles away.