In the low-lying fog of early morning, the hills above Salem’s Royal Side stirred with the familiar clang of a blacksmith’s hammer and the scent of woodsmoke curling from fieldstone chimneys. The year was 1659. Just a generation earlier, this had been a wilderness bristling with fear and faith in equal measure. Now it was becoming a town of shape and order, carved by Puritan will from the thick Massachusetts woods. Here, on the northern bank of the Bass River—what would soon be called Beverly—a child was born into a world already heavy with expectations: his name, John Cressey.