Thomas Cornell Sr (c. 1595 – c. 1655) was one of the earliest settlers of Boston (1638), Rhode Island (1643) and the Bronx, and a contemporary of Roger Williams and the family of Anne Hutchinson.
Cornell was born and christened 24 March 1591–92 in Saffron Walden, Essex, England, and died in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, on 8 February 1654–55.
Thomas Cornell was an innkeeper in Boston who was part of the Peripheral Group in the Antinomian Controversy, a religious and political conflict in the Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638.
[1] Cornell sold his inn in 1643 and left for Rhode Island, where others from the Antinomian Controversy had settled in 1638 after being ordered to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
This case and its history has been chronicled in the book Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell (2002) by Elaine Forman Crane.