In the marketplace of ideas, Salem, Massachusetts has long had witchcraft cornered. In the public mind, American witchery and the 1692 Salem Witch Trials are one and the same, a dour Puritan affair in which fearful, superstitious Calvinists turn on friends and neighbors in a fit of paranoia and religious zealotry. Salem has shamelessly exploited the events, building a kitschy tourist economy based on the state-sponsored murder of 25 of its citizens.
But accusations of witchcraft weren’t limited to Massachusetts or the Puritans, nor did it start in Salem. Indeed, ten years before the Parris girls began writhing about in Salem, the people of seacoast New Hampshire and southernmost Maine were embroiled in an outbreak of their own.
The Portsmouth Witch Hunt of 1682, which followed a series of “supernatural” stone-throwing attacks on the owner of a rowdy, debauched Quaker tavern, overturns the stereotypes. Here, in a colony peopled by Anglicans, Methodists and Quakers, were accusations of witchcraft without Puritans; there were accusations and counter-accusations from New Castle, New Hampshire to Berwick, Maine, but nobody was actually brought to trial; and, most significantly, both the perpetrators and the victims were almost certainly aware that nothing supernatural had happened at all.
York resident Emerson Baker spent years investigating the incidents, suspects and victims of the events on the Piscataqua. His findings — laid out in his newly released The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft & Conflict in early New England (Palgrave Macmillan) — reveal the web of real-world conflicts that prompted the accusations: a 50-year-long property dispute, a legacy of lawsuits between neighbors and the presence of Quaker George Walton’s bawdy tavern amidst the Anglican-held farms of Portsmouth’s Great Island district, which is now New Castle, New Hampshire.
“This was not weird science with rocks falling out of the sky, these were deliberate acts by human beings,” says Baker, a history professor at Salem State College. “To me the only mystery was who were these people and why were they involved. This was like The Murder on the Orient Express. Whodunit? Everybody. The whole community was lined up against Walton.”
The incidents started on the night of June 11, 1682, when stones began raining down on Walton’s tavern, which was located where the New Castle school is today. Windows were broken and stones fell down the chimney and even began being cast from inside the premises. The stoning continued through the summer, while Walton’s crops, farming tools and personal property began vanishing or destroying itself. Walton’s head was seriously fractured in one attack, and his infant grandchild was almost struck in another.
As Baker shows, there were many reasons for Walton’s neighbors to begin casting stones his way. But Walton fought back, accusing one of them — Hannah Jones — of being in league with the “stone-throwing devil.” Jones in turn denounced Walton as a warlock, while in nearby Berwick, Maine, a woman reported being stoned and scratched in her own home. (She was likely covering up serious domestic abuse.) The “devil” spent the rest of the summer destroying fences, taunting people with apparitions, and stealing property on both sides of the border.
These days New Castle is rapidly filling up with wealthy transplants from points south. But what natives remain have long known the witch story. “It was handed down from generation to generation, but it was always treated as a ghost story, as tales of the haunting,” says Rodney Rowland, a native of New Castle and president of its historical society. “What [Baker] has brought to it is legitimate, concrete evidence of what might have actually occurred and why.”
Tom Hardiman, keeper of the Portland Athenaeum, notes that the story was included in the works of 19th century writers like Samuel Adams Drake and William Cullen Bryant, who described them “as the quaint old stories of deluded people.”
“This is one of the clearest discussions of the sort of cultural clashes that existed in early northern New England, where there wasn’t a monolithic Puritan culture,” he says. “People here were from all different parts, not only of England, but from Greece and Portugal, and there were plenty of Royalists and Anglicans.”
For Baker, who speaks quickly and brings his Red Sox cap to the podium when giving talks, the Portsmouth witch tale is intriguing for what it reveals about the cultural fabric of early Maine and New Hampshire. “I’ve been trying in my career to stress how very different Maine and New Hampshire were from southern New England,” he says. “When people talk about the history of New England — or even New England itself — they don’t mean us, they mean Massachusetts.”
“This is the story of the other New England,” he adds as he puts on his cap to go. “Massachusetts invaded us and took us over [in the 1650s], so please don’t lump us in with those folks.”
Colin Woodard is the author of The Lobster Coast, The Republic of Pirates, and Ocean’s End. He lives in Portland and maintains colinwoodard.com.