In 1785 or thereabouts, Margaret Krieger stood accused of a most heinous and ungodly offense. In the vernacular of 18th-century New Englanders, she was “an extraordinary woman” — or, in modern parlance, a witch. For the crime of being strong, capable and independent in an age when women were treated as chattel, the widow from North Pownal was given a Hobson’s choice: She could either climb to the top of a tall tree that would be chopped down with her in it or be thrust through a hole in the ice on the Hoosic River.
If Krieger survived either ordeal, a town safety committee ordained, then it proved she was in league with the devil — a witch. If she died, her soul was pure and her name would be absolved.
Forced to choose between two unpalatable fates, Krieger took the icy plunge — and lived to tell the tale. An episode of the PBS show “New England Legends” featuring a segment on Krieger and the Pownal witch trial airs this Thursday, October 31, on Vermont Public television.
Krieger’s cruel ordeal is noteworthy in that it happened nearly a century after the more famous Salem witch trials.
Vermont’s only documented witch trial is but one of countless injustices perpetrated on women through history. In the past year, though, the story of the Pownal witch trial has found a modern audience, in part because of new discoveries about its victim. In a season when misogynistic politics are playing out at the national level and candidates casually toss out accusations of “witch hunts,” Krieger’s story serves as another reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Margaret Schumacher Krieger would have remained a footnote in Vermont history had her identity not been unearthed by another Pownal woman: Joyce Held, an amateur historian and genealogist. A member of the Pownal Historical Society for the past 30 years, Held spent more than a decade trying to identify Krieger, find her grave and piece together the story of her life.
“It was like an awakening,” Held told Seven Days, recalling the moment on September 16, 2023, when she and Jamie Franklin, director of collections and exhibitions at the Bennington Museum, unveiled a new historical marker commemorating the Pownal witch trial. “People were like, ‘My gosh! That really happened.’ And it’s still happening in its own way today.'”
Virtually everything we know about Krieger’s trial comes from a one-paragraph account, written more than 80 years after the fact by T.E. Brownell in an 1867 edition of Vermont Historical Gazetteer. The Pownal attorney and historian noted that a “Widow Krieger” had been accused of being a witch, tested by the townspeople and judged innocent after she was pulled from the bottom of the river, still alive.
Krieger’s cruel ordeal is noteworthy in that it happened nearly a century after the more famous Salem witch trials, when the popular belief in witches was already in decline. In fact, the state’s sole documented witch trial — technically, Vermont was an independent republic at the time — is also the last recorded witch trial to occur in New England.
The historical record suggests that the accusations against Krieger had no relation to the Wiccan faith or other pagan practices, which provided the pretext for many persecutions of witches through the centuries. Krieger was targeted not for her religious beliefs but because she was an outsider and a financially independent and vulnerable widow. As Carol F. Karlsen writes in her 1987 book The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England, “The story of witchcraft is primarily the story of women.”
Krieger was born Margarete Schumacher in Williamstown, Mass., in 1725 to German immigrants. In 1741, at the age of 16, she married Johann Juri Krieger of New York, who moved them to a sparsely populated settlement in what is now Pownal. The English settlers there referred to the family as Dutch, an error that, Franklin explained, was likely due to the fact that the German word for German is Deutsch.
Krieger had three sons by the age of 21, two of whom predeceased her, including William, who was killed in the Battle of Bennington. Though the Kriegers were considered foreign squatters by the English who chartered Pownal in 1760, Held said, they were allowed to stay because they had built a grist mill on the Hoosic River, which the settlers needed.
Johann died in 1785, leaving Margaret alone, as her sons had moved back to Williamstown to open mills of their own. The widow continued to operate the business herself — which, according to Brownell’s account, “brought upon her the envy and suspicion” of her neighbors.
Held and Franklin believe that Krieger was accused of witchcraft soon after her husband died, either because the community feared she would become a financial burden or, more likely, because the townspeople wanted her mill.
Historically, such trumped-up charges weren’t uncommon. According to Karlsen, New England women accused of witchcraft typically had no living male heirs and often owned or were about to inherit property. In the deeply patriarchal society of the time, a woman’s successful management of her own affairs was considered an “extraordinary power” — another charge leveled against Krieger — explainable only by evil supernatural forces.
For more than a century after Brownell wrote his account of the Pownal witch trial, no one knew or cared who Widow Krieger was. Then, in the early 2000s, Held came across the passage and was intrigued. Though she knew of a rocky hillside feature in North Pownal called Krieger’s Rocks or Witch’s Rocks, she had found nothing in the historical record about the name’s origin. Complicating her search was the absence of Widow Krieger’s full name from the account.
“If they had used Margaret,” she said, “I would have been able to find her in a heartbeat.”
Once she had identified Krieger’s husband — the spelling of Johann Juri had been anglicized to “John George” — she was “on a roll.” She eventually tracked down the couple’s marriage certificate in New York, Margaret’s family records in Williamstown and even her will, which Margaret marked with a single letter M. Evidently, she could neither read nor write.
In spring 2022, Franklin and Held began working together to create a Legends & Lore historical marker for the Pownal witch trial. The previous year, Vermont Folklife had joined forces with the New York-based William G. Pomeroy Foundation, which administers the marker program nationally, to erect a similar one to commemorate the Manchester Vampire.
According to that 18th-century Vermont legend, Revolutionary War veteran captain Isaac Burton believed that his deceased first wife, Rachel, was a vampire who had returned from the grave to kill her successor. Both women had died of consumption, or tuberculosis, which gives patients coughing fits that can leave blood on their lips. The family exhumed Rachel’s body and burned it in a public spectacle in 1793. Historians now believe that captain Burton was actually an asymptomatic TB carrier.
The foundation granted Franklin and Held’s request to commemorate Krieger, and a marker was established at 50 Dean Road in North Pownal. A week before the unveiling ceremony in 2023, Held and her husband were searching the Westlawn Cemetery in Williamstown for Krieger’s grave. After previous attempts had come up empty, Held said, she closed her eyes and asked aloud, “Where are you?”
Then she looked to her right and spotted an M on a nearby gravestone. “And there she was.” She had found Krieger’s grave, alongside her husband’s.
“When I saw that stone,” Held said, “I thought, What would I have done if I’d lived in Pownal at that time when this woman was being accused? Would I have kept my mouth shut? Would I have helped her?”
Held said she did the only thing she could think of: She hugged the gravestone and started to cry. She had her answer.
Blaming witches for crop failures, livestock deaths and unexplained sicknesses may seem like a practice from a bygone era, but deadly witch hunts still happen today. Between 2009 and 2019, at least 20,000 “witches” were killed in 60 countries, according to a 2020 United Nations report. The true number is likely much higher.
In Pownal, Krieger’s historical marker has become the center of an annual September event that features music, games, costumes and a “witches’ walk” on a bridge that crosses the Hoosic River. At its dedication ceremony, Franklin said, “We seek to remind ourselves and future generations of the dangers of seeking to harass and harm our neighbors, literal and figurative, simply because they may be different than us. Let us be wiser and better than those who came before us.”
“New England Legends” airs Thursday, October 31, 8:30 p.m., on Vermont Public television. Learn more at vermontpublic.org and ournewenglandlegends.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Accused | Why Vermont’s only documented witch trial still has relevance today”
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This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2024.
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