Reporting History

The following report of a trial in West Jersey for witchcraft, is preserved in an Almanac published in the year 1807. The trial took place in Burlington county, in the 1730, a little more than a century ago, and as an incident of the “good old times” of which we often hear, has some interest for the modern reader. We find it in the Mount Holly Mirror.

Were there no other reason for promoting an increase of knowledge, it would be desirable for the sake of humanity only, to give such information as exhibits the singular ignorance of former ages and the improvements of succeeding generations. The following account taken from the Pennsylvania Gazette, of October 1730, is inserted to evince not only the absurdity, but the cruelty, of a superstitious error which about that period infected not merely the common people, but the expounders of law and dispensers of justice. We may now flatter ourselves that the terror of witchcraft is no more ; and that’a poor woman may be both old and ugly without being in danger of hanging for being too light in the water, or drowning for being too heavy:

Young Man Injured in Accident on Hill; Horse Hurt in Second Street

Harry Bowers, aged 22 years, received severe lacerations of the head, when knocked from a wagon, which collided with a street car at Sixteenth and State streets this morning. Bowers was driving a double team for Lewis Stover, a trucker near Reservoir Park.

With Bowers was Clayton Fackler, another employee on the Stover farm. The wagon was en route east on the car tracks. Bowers started to turn his horses off the track when the car hit him.