How Moll Pitcher Told Fortunes

When Lynn historian and poet Alonzo Lewis first wrote about Mary “Moll” Pitcher in 1829, he described her reading tea leaves. But he immediately stated the real source of her insights:

She also availed herself of every ordinary mode of information, particularly by causing one of her domestics to talk with her visitors, to elicit the nature of their business, while she remained in an adjoining room, pretending to be absent. These arts, added to her natural shrewdness, and readiness to seize the slightest hint which might assist her in her surmises, appear to have constituted the whole amount of her power.

Likewise, in his 1852 Life of Lord Timothy Dexter Samuel L. Knapp described how Pitcher won the trust of that eccentric and superstitious merchant:

The first time he visited the dame he went in disguise; but she soon found him out, but, concealing the fact, told all that had happened to him for many years past, and this chained him at once to the full belief of the potency of her spells.

An article about Pitcher in the 12 July 1879 Boston Traveller went further in presenting Pitcher as a deliberate con artist. That was more than sixty years after she had died, and it’s quite possible the stories had been made more entertaining in those decades. Even the anonymous chronicler cited his or her sources with ambivalence: “according to all reports—they are nothing more.” But that article said:

It was always the aim of Moll to find out as much as she could, from whoever wished to consult her, of the circumstances which led to their desired consultation with herself. She could not do it herself, for that would be too suspicious.

Just here the daughter “Becky” was of value. She was to receive the visitors and talk with them. She was to tell them that her mother was away, but would be back presently. The truth is, however, that Moll was hid in one of the adjoining rooms, and was intently listening to the conversation, which of course was very material to her. When she had gathered all she cared to know and was ready to enter, she slipped out and entered by the door. Then with a wonderful accuracy she proceeded to tell all the circumstances, and fairly startled her visitors with her knowledge. . . .

Moll sometimes demanded a high price for her tales, and woe be to the person who refused it. Here, again, “Becky” is said to have been required. In the upper chamber of the hovel was kept a large ox-chain, but sufficiently light for a woman to drag about upon the floor. This chain was supposed to be attached to the devil: really it was attached to “Becky,” and she moved it about when required. If any visitors refused to pay the price which Moll demanded, they were told that the devil would be after them. Immediately the ox-chain is dragged across the floor above by Becky, and then the visitors immediately “come down,” and on the instant the clanking of the chain ceases. The result was that the visitors were so terribly frightened that they really believed the devil was in the house.

The Traveller had some other unflattering things to say about Moll Pitcher and her children. It reported her son John “did not like to work, and his mother humored his aversion to labor by supporting him.” He became known for his fashionable clothes, “the crack young man of the town.” The author said John Pitcher “married a Marblehead girl” and “died young,” and indeed the town vital records say a John Pitcher married in 1799 and died in 1803 at age twenty-five.

Most damning, the Traveller article included this anecdote about Moll Pitcher, though the author added a cautionary “if true”:

She was peculiar, and had many eccentricities. One was to wear two very large pockets in her dress. They were on each side, and would hold a peck each. Why she wore these pockets was long a mystery. At last it was solved.

One day she visited the grocery and apothecary store of Dr. Lummus, and while he was engaged Moll quietly slipped some articles of merchandise into the pockets, such as tea, coffee, sugar, &c. Unfortunately, Dr. Lummus saw her. He did not openly accuse her at first, but, approaching her, he said: “Moll, I want my fortune told. I have lost a number of articles from my store, and I want to detect the thief.”

Moll tried to turn him aside from his purpose, and laughed at his temporary anxiety to have his fortune told, and promised to tell it at some future time. Dr. Lummus then said: “I know the thief.” And, he emptied the pockets of Moll, much to her discomfiture and displeasure.

The only Lynn apothecary I could find named Lummus was Edward Augustus Lummus, who was born in 1820, seven years after Moll Pitcher died. So if that story had a factual basis, it was mangled in the telling.

Pitcher’s daughters married in Lynn, and their descendants remained in town, preserving some of her possessions. It’s therefore possible the inside stories about her methods to support her family telling fortunes came from straight-talking descendants, or from neighbors, or from locals looking for good tales about the local witch.

Visiting Moll Pitcher, the Fortune-Teller of Lynn

To visit the fortune-teller Mary “Moll” Pitcher, chroniclers of Lynn wrote, people looked for the house of Dr. Henry Burchstead. He was the [grand]son of a physician from Silesia, and he built a large house on what is now Essex Street.

More notably, Burchstead set up two large whale bones in the form of a “gothic arch” as his front gate. Alonzo Lewis, followed by other authors, said that visitors to Lynn embarrassed to have people know they were consulting Pitcher would instead ask for directions to “the bones of the great whale.”

There’s one problem with those directions, however. According to a genealogy published in the Massachusetts Magazine in 1910, Dr. Henry Burchstead died in 1755, five years before Moll Pitcher married and decades before Lewis and those other chroniclers lived. [CORRECTION: The Dr. Burchsted who died in 1755 was succeeded by his son, another Dr. Henry Burchsted, who lived to 1807. The younger man set up the whalebone gate.] James R. Newhall’s 1897 expansion of Lewis’s history of Lynn said other doctors took over that house: Dr. Peter G. Robbins in 1805 and Dr. Richard Hazeltine in 1817. But it’s not clear who lived there from 1755 to 1805, covering the bulk of Moll Pitcher’s career. In any case, people looked for the whale bones.

Lewis described “the humble dwelling of Molly Pitcher, which stood on what was then a lonely road, near the foot of High Rock.” A less flattering, secondhand description of Pitcher published in the 12 July 1879 Boston Traveller and reprinted in the 15 July New York Times said the house was

a black two-story hovel, which stood in a large field, familiarly called in those days the Pitcher field. There was a well-beaten pathway running from the old rickety gate up to the single door. Before the door, was placed an irregular block of stone, and even that, to the superstitious, had its terrors. . . .

The field where the cottage stood has been filled with nice dwellings, and there is not a sign left of the mysterious dwelling-place…except the remodeled hovel which stands in the rear. It has been materially changed and would scarcely be recognized.

In the March 1899 Essex Antiquarian, Sidney Perley published a picture of the Pitcher house “as it formerly appeared.” It looks like it had one story and an attic, four windows in front, and a small extension on the left side. That picture shows a standard Georgian center door while the 1879 article stated the “single door…stood to the extreme left of the house and opened into a small entry-way, which, in turn, opened into a rather larger room, where Moll received her visitors. There were two small rooms adjoining this large one, where were used for various purposes.” Those two reports seem incompatible.

Perley included three other relics of Mary Pitcher: her signature from some 1770 document, a black bonnet she was known to wear, and a table.

The Essex Institute, owner of this table, is now part of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. I wonder if Moll Pitcher’s table is still in its inventory, and if it gets brought out during Salem’s witch tourism season.

TOMORROW: The exposé.

Seeking a Clear Image of Moll Pitcher

To figure out what sort of fortune-telling Mary “Moll” Pitcher of Lynn did requires getting around the romanticized descriptions and legends that grew over the nineteenth century.

For example, in Moll Pitcher’s Prophecies; or, The American Sibyl (1895), Ellen M. Griffin claimed that Maj. John Pitcairn visited Pitcher on 17 Apr 1775, and she took information about the march to Concord that she gained from him to the Marblehead Patriot Elbridge Gerry. (Who was actually out of town that week.)

Likewise, there was a widely commonly reprinted picture of Pitcher, shown here. People who had actually seen her in life said it was a terrible likeness. Authors wrote that she was thin, with “a long Athenian nose,” and as she aged “Her nose became peaked and her features seemed to lengthen.” An 1879 profile said, “Her most habitual mode of covering her head, and one perhaps peculiar to herself, was to bind a black silk handkerchief about her forehead.” Nothing of the sort shown in the picture.

That mythologizing process started even in Pitcher’s lifetime. The only reference to her fortune-telling that I’ve found from before her death in 1813 is a series of letters published in the Boston Weekly Magazine. These started as a debate between the fashionable Boston woman Mary Ann Smartly and the Lynn Quaker Rebecca Plainly. The 26 Feb 1803 Smartly letter says:

And now to address you in your own shocking style.—Good Rebecca, (lord, what an old fashioned name) how knowest thou that my wig is red? Hast thou been to Moll Pitcher, to know what colour it is of? Pray thee, how much did it cost thee and the old witch to ascertain the colour of my wig? For I suppose it is some trouble to Mrs. Pitcher, to conjure up her infernal agents.

A Plainly letter dated 6 March likewise alluded to “Moll Pitcher.” And then on 2 April the magazine published a letter dated from Lynn on 17 March with Moll Pitcher’s name at the bottom. That was a protest against her being misrepresented, using Christian language and allusions. It also mentioned having read Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, published in England four years before.

For all of this Moll Pitcher’s protests against people misusing her name, I can’t help but suspect that the real Mary Pitcher of Lynn wasn’t involved in that debate at all. The correspondents and their letters all appear to be literary creations. Smartly and Plainly were voices for an ongoing philosophical debate, and whoever wrote the Moll Pitcher letters appears to have treated her as equally symbolic, even though the real woman was still active.

When Pitcher died, the Rev. William Bentley of Salem wrote in his diary for 19 May 1813:

The death of Widow Mary Pitcher, aet. [aged] 75, in Lynn furnishes two facts to the World. This woman has been commonly resorted to by this neighbourhood as a fortune teller & died in the full reputation of her skill. Some dared to insinuate she was a Witch, but there was no fire or halter in the Law for her. Superstition in this sort is still general among seamen & even among such as are not of the lowest order of them. It is a more pleasing circumstance attending the death of “Mother Pitcher” as she is commonly named by those who call upon her, that her death is said to be the only one in Lynn, for five months past from a population exceeding 4 thousand.

The basic source about Mary Pitcher is Alonzo Lewis’s history of Lynn, published in 1829, revised in 1844, and re-edited by later scholars. Lewis saw Pitcher personally as a child, and his attitude toward her was neither credulous nor disdainful. I quoted what he first wrote about Moll Pitcher a couple of days ago. According to him, “Her only ostensible means of obtaining secret knowledge” was reading tea leaves.

Lewis described people coming to Pitcher with three main questions:

• “affairs of love.” Yet I haven’t come across a single anecdote about this sort of prophecy.
• “loss of property.” In his History of the Town of Groton (1848), Caleb Butler wrote that Pitcher was “employed in the search” for valuable millstones lost when a flood destroyed a gristmill around 1700; however, the stones were never found.
• “surmises respecting the vicissitudes of their future fortune,” particularly ocean voyages. Many sailors visited Pitcher, as did eccentric leather-dresser and merchant “Lord” Timothy Dexter after his first fortune-teller of choice, Jane Hooper of Newburyport, died in 1798.

Pitcher’s pronouncements could affect the maritime labor market. In the first volume of his Narrative of Voyages and Travels (1817), Amasa Delano wrote about the grand ship Massachusetts, launched from Quincy in 1789 to trade with China under captain Job Prince and supercargo Samuel Shaw. It didn’t actually set out until the following year. Why?

It is worthy of remark that the Massachusetts had more than three crews shipped before she sailed from Boston. The greatest part of them left the ship in consequence of a prediction by an old woman, a fortune teller, Moll Pitcher of Lynn, that the Massachusetts would be lost, and every man on board of her. Such was the superstition of our seamen at that time, that the majority of them believed the prophecy, and were actuated by it in their conduct.

Ten years later George Whitney wrote in Some Account of the Early History and Present State of the Town of Quincy, “It is commonly reported that this ship was lost in her first voyage. This, however, is not true. The report probably arose from a prediction, of Moll Pitcher of Lynn, a fortune-teller, that she would be lost and every man in her.” And from the fact that the Massachusetts never did return to America; Shaw sold the ship to some even more desperate Danish merchants in the Pacific.

TOMORROW: Visiting Moll Pitcher.

The Fleeting Facts of Moll Pitcher’s Life

Authors disagree about Mary (Moll) Pitcher’s family background. When she died in 1813, she was said to be seventy-five years old, meaning she was born around 1738. No birth or baptism records have been found to match or confirm that.

In his 1844 revision of his History of Lynn, Alonzo Lewis wrote: “Her grand-father, John Dimond, lived at Marblehead, and for many years exercised the same pretensions [to foretelling the future]. Her father, Capt. John Dimond, was master of a vessel from that place, and was living in 1770.”

However, James R. Newhall wrote in his description of Lynn in the 1888 History of Essex County that Mary Pitcher’s father was named Aholiab Diamond while her grandfather was “Captain John Diamond, of Marblehead.” Newhall later edited and revised Lewis’s book, reproducing Mary Pitcher’s signature but leaving out most details about her.

Samuel Roads, Jr.’s The History and Traditions of Marblehead (1880) hints in yet another direction. It suggests that “the famous ‘old Dimond’ of whom such fabulous stories were told and believed” was named Edward Diamond. “It was said that he was a wizard, and possessed the ‘black art’—which enabled him to foretell coming events, to avert disasters from his friends, and bring distress upon his enemies.” Subsequent authors identified Edward Diamond as inhabitant of the house shown above and Moll Pitcher’s fabled grandfather. More recently, John Hardy Wright’s Marblehead says he was her great-uncle. Or he could have been her great-grandfather by that name, who reportedly lived until 1732.

Writing in the Essex Antiquarian in 1899, Sidney Perley agreed with Newhall that Mary’s father was Aholiab Diamond. The vital records of Lynn say that Aholiab Dimond, “cordwainer, s[on of]. Aholiab, of Marblehead, shoreman,” married Lydia Sillsbee on 11 Dec 1735. The groom was then twenty-five years old, his birth having been recorded in Marblehead.

Perley appears to have rested his case for this paternity on real estate records. In 1738 Lydia’s father conveyed to Aholiab Diamond some land in Lynn in an area known as Wood-end Rocks. Aholiab built a small house there on what would become Essex Street, and Mary inherited that house around 1768. That’s where she received clients for decades until her death.

On 2 Oct 1760 Mary Dimond married Robert Pitcher in Lynn, according to the town’s vital records. Lewis identified Pitcher as a shoemaker, and Perley speculated that he had been one of Aholiab Diamond’s apprentices. Lewis stated that the couple had “one son, John, and three daughters, Rebecca, Ruth, and Lydia.” They don’t appear in town vital records, however, until the daughters start to marry in 1785.

A John Pitcher of Lynn married Lydia Twison of Marblehead in 1799 and died of consumption at the age of twenty-five in 1803. If that was Robert and Mary’s son, he was born in 1778 when his mother was about forty. The couple might well have had other children who didn’t survive.

In his 1844 book Alonzo Lewis, who was born in Lynn in 1794, described Mary Pitcher this way:

She was of the medium height and size for a woman, with a good form and agreeable manners. Her head, phrenologically considered, was somewhat capacious; her forehead broad and full, her hair dark brown, her nose inclining to long, and her face pale and thin. There was nothing gross or sensual in her appearance—her countenance was rather intellectual; and she had that contour of face and expression, which, without being positively beautiful, is, nevertheless, decidedly interesting—a thoughtful, pensive, and sometimes down-cast look, almost approaching to melancholy—an eye, when it looked at you, of calm and keen penetration—and an expression of intelligent discernment, half mingled with a glance of shrewdness.

By that point John Greenleaf Whittier had promulgated a much less flattering description in the poem Moll Pitcher. Whittier wasn’t from Lynn and had never known Pitcher; he was simply replicating the stereotype of a witch, and Lewis wanted to correct that notion.

Lewis also justified Mary Pitcher’s profession, writing, “She took a poor man for a husband, and then adopted what she doubtless thought the harmless employment of fortune-telling, in order to support her children.” And, “She supported her family by her skill, and she was benevolent in her disposition. She has been known to rise before sunrise, walk two miles to a mill, purchase a quantity of meal, and carry it to a poor widow, who would otherwise have had no breakfast for her children.”

TOMORROW: What did people ask Mary Pitcher to do?

The Original Molly Pitcher

As quoted yesterday, two publications from 1835—one in English and one in German—appear to be the first print appearances of the name “Molly Pitcher” in stories about a female artillerist at the Battle of Monmouth.

But that name had already appeared in print attached to a completely different person: a fortune-teller active in Lynn in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

An article about “Witchcraft” in the October 1825 issue of the Boston Monthly Magazine, edited by Samuel L. Knapp, mentioned “Moll Pitcher, of Lynn,” and stated: “she was so well known to most persons, that their recollections will be better than any description.” Pitcher was such a celebrity, at least locally, that she needed no introduction.

In 1829 Bernard Whitman published A Lecture on Popular Superstitions in Boston. He wrote:

Not many years ago, a man was suddenly missing from a certain town in this commonwealth. The church immediately sent one of her members to consult the far famed fortune telling Molly Pitcher. After making the necessary inquiries, she intimated that the absent person had been murdered by a family of negroes, and his body sunk in the deep waters behind their dwelling. Upon this evidence, the accused were forthwith imprisoned, and the pond raked in vain from shore to shore. A few days previous to the trial, the murdered man returned to his friends safe and sound; thus giving the naughty skeptics occasion to say, that the fortune teller, instead of receiving from the devil information of distant and future events, had actually played the very devil with the superstitious church.

I have no clue about the accuracy of that story, which Whitman told with a frustratingly low number of specifics that can be tracked down.

In that same year, a more complimentary description of Pitcher appeared in the first edition of Alonzo Lewis’s History of Lynn:

The celebrated Mary Pitcher, a professed fortune teller, died on the ninth of April, 1813, at the age of 75 years. Her grandfather, John Diamond, lived at Marblehead, and was for many years celebrated for the exercise of the same pretensions. She was married to Robert Pitcher of Lynn, in 1760, and had several children.

This person has been more celebrated than any individual of her class in modern times. Not only was her name known in most towns throughout the United States, but probably there is not a port in Europe, visited by American ships, that has not heard of the skill of “Moll Pitcher.” Many persons came from places far remote, to consult with her on affairs of love or loss of property, or to obtain her surmises respecting the vicissitudes of their future fortune. Every youth who was not assured of the reciprocal affection of his fair one, and every maid who was desirous of anticipating the hour of her highest felicity, repaired at evening to the humble dwelling of Molly Pitcher, which stood on what was then a lonely road, near the foot of High Rock, with a single habitation nearly opposite, at the gate of which stood two bones of the great whale, which the waves of ocean, in the liberality of their power, had cast upon the beach.

To that place also were seen repairing sailors from the neighboring commercial towns, who were desirous of ascertaining the probable success of their future voyages. Many a reputable merchant too, of whose treasures on the faithless waves, the courier of intelligence had not brought the expected information, and being fearful of betraying the nature of his business by inquiring directly for “Moll Pitcher,” has raised a smile by asking in what part of the town he should find the bones of the great whale.

Her skill was principally exercised for the discovery of things lost, either material objects which had been mislaid or purloined, or the affections of some disconsolate fair one, which had taken the advantage of some favorable opportunity to elope. Her power of evil, if she possessed any, was never exerted, unless to punish such delinquents as refused to pay her for the knowledge which she pretended to impart. Some instances have been related, in which she has evinced an unusual degree of discernment; while in others her assertions have had no relation to facts, but appear to have been the result of mere guess work and presumption.

Her only ostensible means of obtaining secret knowledge, was the simple use of tea-grounds poured into a cup; and as the grains were disposed in a peculiar manner, or assumed a particular form, so she judged of the things to which she fancied a resemblance. She also availed herself of every ordinary mode of information, particularly by causing one of her domestics to talk with her visitors, to elicit the nature of their business, while she remained in an adjoining room, pretending to be absent. These arts, added to her natural shrewdness, and readiness to seize the slightest hint which might assist her in her surmises, appear to have constituted the whole amount of her power.

Her sagacity bore no proportion to the infatuation of those who trusted to it. She seems even to have admitted this, especially in one instance, when some gentlemen offered her a large sum, if she would inform them what ticket would draw the highest prize in a certain lottery. “Do you think,” said she, “if I knew, I should not buy it myself?”

Whatever may have been the witchcraft recognised in the Hebrew law, whether an actual communication with evil spirits, or the practice of deception by the means of false pretensions, an impartial investigation of the facts respecting “Moll Pitcher,” justify the conclusion, that her skill had no other foundation, than the practice of uncommon arts, assisted by an unusual degree of shrewdness and discernment.

In the next decade other authors appropriated Mary Pitcher for literary creations. In 1832 John Greenleaf Whittier published a poem, Moll Pitcher, which described her as stereotypical old witch. (The image above comes from a copy of that book owned by the University of Texas; in it someone has drawn several pictures of Pitcher talking back to Whittier.)

Two years later Samuel G. Goodrich’s Token and Atlantic Souvenir included a fictional story called “The Modern Job” with Pitcher as a character: “Moll Pitcher, or, as she is still called in the neighborhood where she resided, Molly Pitcher, was no ordinary woman. . . . In short, poor Molly, by degrees, was made to be a fortune-teller, and a diviner, in spite of herself.”

Thus, when American authors referred to the Monmouth artillerist as “Molly Pitcher” in 1835, they were echoing a name already well known among American sailors and New Englanders in general. Was that echo some kind of inside joke or allusion lost on us? Or had Revolutionary soldiers nicknamed the artillerist after the fortune-teller from Lynn, and why?

Again, Ray Raphael already noted this curious concatenation of Molly Pitchers in his book Founding Myths and in this Journal of the American Revolution article. Because Pitcher lived in Revolutionary New England, I’m going to dig a little deeper into her curious career.

TOMORROW: Moll Pitcher in the flesh.