NORTH POWNAL — On the bank of the Hoosic River, beside farms, homes and railroad tracks, stands a historic marker labeled “WITCH TRIAL.” It says a woman known as Widow Krieger escaped drowning in the river sometime around 1785, when she was tried for allegedly being a witch.
Her accusers believed witches would float if dropped in the river. When she was placed in a hole amid the frozen Hoosic, Widow Krieger sank. She was pulled out of the water, absolved of the witchcraft charge, and lived for another five years.
This story — the only known witch trial within the boundaries of what is now Vermont — would have remained a footnote in historical records if not for the efforts of a present-day woman. Joyce Held, a Pownal resident and member of the Pownal Historical Society, felt a pull to find out as much as she could about Widow Krieger after reading about the witch trial a decade ago. In doing so, she discovered an 18th-century figure whose experiences still resonate with people today.
“She was tried — and how unfair it was — just because they thought she was different,” Held, 77, said. “They said she had extraordinary powers. I think her extraordinary powers were that she was a strong woman.”
Using methods Held learned in her own genealogical research — reading old publications, making phone calls, digging through town records, finding information online and visiting sites — she was able to assemble a three-dimensional picture of Widow Krieger.
“It established the timeline for what happened and established her name. The narrative that we’re telling today is much more specific, and all based on Joyce’s research,” said Jamie Franklin, curator of the Bennington Museum. The museum collaborated with the Pownal Historical Society to put up the witch trial marker in September.
Widow Krieger, the daughter of German immigrants, was born Margarete Schumacher in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in either 1724 or 1725, according to Held’s research.
She married Johann Juri Krieger, a German immigrant who was around 14 years her senior, and together they had three sons: John, Peter and William. (The couple’s first and last names were spelled differently in various historical records.)
Her husband built a gristmill along the Hoosic River and a small home just north of it in what is now North Pownal. In 1760, the Pownal town proprietors voted to grant him single ownership in recognition of his improvements to the land.
The town proprietors in Williamstown, Massachusetts, located about 8 miles south of the Kriegers’ home, later gave the Kriegers’ three sons land to build a corn mill and a sawmill. Peter, however, died in 1772, at age 27. William died five years later, at age 31, during the Battle of Bennington.
Margarete Krieger’s husband died in 1785 — the same year she was believed to have been put on trial. She would have been around 60 years old.
Neighbors spoke about Margarete being an “extraordinary woman,” which “brought upon her the envy and suspicion of the good people,” T.E. Brownell wrote in an article published 1867 in The Vermont Historical Gazetteer, which described itself as “a Magazine Embracing a History of Each Town, Civil, Ecclesiastical, Biographical and Military.”
Brownell wrote that after Krieger’s husband passed away, she was accused of being a witch and hauled before a committee appointed to dispense justice in such cases.
The committee initially decided to put Krieger through two tests, according to Brownell’s account. First, they would make her climb a tree and the tree would be cut. If she survived the ordeal, it would prove she was a witch, they reasoned. The second was the sinking test, the only one the committee ultimately pursued.
Brownell’s article, the earliest known account of the witch trial, is a secondhand report of the incident. But Franklin, of the Bennington Museum, said it is consistent with the broader historical context and other reports of witch trials during this period.
“There’s no reason to not believe the story,” he said. “The little evidence that we do have, and the facts that we have, support that version of the story that has been told and we’re continuing to pass down through the marker.”
The circa-1785 witch trial in the township of Pownal, part of what Franklin said was then the independent republic of Vermont, is included in the Bennington Museum’s ongoing exhibition “Haunted Vermont.”
Franklin had learned of Held’s research work and, while he was putting the show together, reached out to her for additional information on Margarete Krieger. He suggested that the museum and the Pownal Historical Society apply for a historical marker grant to memorialize the witch trial, which they received from a program of the Vermont Folklife center and The William G. Pomeroy Foundation.
Franklin agrees with Held’s theory that Krieger was put on trial because she was a strong woman who defied the local 18th-century norms. Women during that era weren’t allowed to own property, yet Held said Krieger’s will showed she had 18 sheep that she divided among her grandchildren. Franklin believes that, after her husband’s death, she may have resisted people’s attempts to get their hands on his land.
“It’s likely that the land would have gone to the sons, and they probably would have allowed their mother to continue living on it,” he said, emphasizing that her sons already had their own land in neighboring Williamstown. “Accusing her of witchcraft would have been a common thing to do in order to take that land away from her.”
In the early evening of Sept. 9, Held, accompanied by her husband, found Krieger’s gravestone at the Westlawn Cemetery in Williamstown. It says she died on Feb. 21, 1790, in her 66th year. She was laid to rest beside her husband, Johann Juri — identified by his anglicized name, John George — along with their son Peter and a granddaughter.
The moment Held saw the gravestone, she put her arms around it and cried. “I was hugging her stone, saying, ‘I am so sorry you went through this,’” she said. “It was just so wrong.”
More than 200 years later, Held said, people can still learn from the mistakes of the Widow Krieger witch trial.
“We are still accusing people of something just because they might look different, act different, have a different belief,” she said. “It’s sad, but we still do it. We still persecute.”
Her next project is to find Krieger’s descendants and organize a reunion. “She’s become an adopted ancestor of mine,” she said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Pownal-area residents memorialize ‘Widow Krieger,’ the subject of Vermont’s only known witch trial.