Lowell Sun newspaper (article was done 2 days after
the first one I posted,
sorry i have a clipped copy without the date)
Story by John Wolfson
BILLERICA WITCH BANISHMENT OVERTURNED 300 YEARS
LATER
A story like this has legs in New England, where
good
fences make good
neighbors and an insignificant slight can spark
generations of inter family
feuding.
When the Billerica Board of Selectmen unanimously
voted to overturn the 1676
banishment of an entire family Monday night, it
marked the official end of a
long road home for the Carrier clan.
When The Sun ran the story on its front page the
next
day, "I nearly fell off
my couch." laughed Patrick Chandler of Lowell, whose
distant cousin painfully
crossed paths with one Martha Carrier, later hanged
and beheaded as a witch,
more than 300 years ago.
Thomas and Martha Carrier and their children were
booted out of Billerica
after someone in the family contracted smallpox. The
family moved to Andover,
eventually becoming neighbors of Benjamin Abbot.
Abbot, Patrick Chandlers cousin, and the Carriers
had
a falling out over
property boundaries sometime the early 1690's,
according to "The Descendants
of William and Annis Chandler," a Chandler family
history published in 1883 by
George Chandler of Worcester.
A furious Martha Carrier warned she "would stick as
close to Abbot as the bark
sticks to a tree," Abbot testified during a trial in
Salem in 1692, when
Martha was adjudicated for afflicting another woman
by witchcraft.
According to the family history, Martha also
threatened Abbot with physical
ailments "so as doctor Prescott should never cure
him."
Among other problems, Abbot developed a sore that,
when lanced by Dr.
Prescott, "several gallons of corruption ran out of
it," George Chandler
wrote.
For six weeks the sores returned and Prescott lanced
them to no avail. Abbot
"was brought to death's door, and so remained until
Carrier was taken and
carrier away (to the trial) by the constable; from
which very day he began to
mend, and so grew better everyday, and is well ever
since," according to the
history.
After Martha was hanged, her corpse was beheaded to
make sure she couldn't
return from the dead, according to Patricia Hurd,
wife of current Billerica
selectman Chairman Edward Hurd, who made the motion
Monday to officially end
the Carriers 323 year exile from the town.
Patricia Hurd, whose maiden name is Carrier, is an
11th generation descendant
of Martha Carrier.
"I know she had problems with some of the neighbors
and put curses on them,"
Hurd said of her ancestor. " They hated her. They
thought she was the queen
witch."
The Carriers three children were also arrested on
suspicion of witchcraft,
Hurd said. "She talked the kids into telling the
authorities they were witches
so they would leave them alone" she said, explaining
that self-confessed
witches were not executed.
Thought the children were tortured, they were
eventually released, Hurd said.
Martha Carrier never admitted to being a witch, she
said.
Patrick Chandler, 48, who has studied his familles
history for nine years, has
managed to trace his roots to 1392 in County
Kildare,
Ireland and knows that
the Chandlers came to America in 1637, when they
settled in Roxbury.
For all his study, however, the 11th generation
American Chandler never knew
what became of Martha Carrier after she was
arrested.
The SUN article
published on Tuesday, he said, "was closure to what
happened to Martha
Carrier. But theres still a piece missing-between
Andover and the gallows.
What happened?"
Asked whether he still harbors bad feelings over the
curse Martha had placed
on his cousin, Chandler smiled and said, " I dont
know if theres a feud, but
if theres any hurt it would have to be with the
Carrier family. It should be
put to an end. I'd like to meet them."
Hurd also seems willing to bury the hatchet.
"If you really sit and think about it, it was really
sad ", she said. "But its
300 years later and we try to be as lighthearted
about it as possible."
In the early 1700's the Massachusetts government,
admitting that Martha
Carrier was likely not a witch after all, apologized
to Thomas carrier for the
hanging and beheading of his wife and paid him a
settlement.
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"I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way
in the end." ~Margaret Thatcher
Researching surnames: Carrier, Dey, Watrous/Waterhouse,
Ingalls, Allen, Spofford, Sessions, Brown, Cook, Cooper,Childs
Wirth, Rosenberger, Fiedler, Auchter, Karch, Schlageter,
Reuther, Kasslar, Baumann to name a few :-)
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