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.

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.