« on: May 30, 2011, 06:22:06 PM »
I'm told this was the last witch trial in the U.S.. It was held in the Lancaster courthouse which still stands today...despite the fact that Sherman's men burned all the records held in the courthouse in an effort to burn it down. A couple or there years ago a disenfranchised yount tried to burn it thinking if he destroyed the courthouse they couldn't try him...

...so they added arson charges to his list. Cost us county citizens over a million to restore it and 35 million for a new courthouse....anyway.
Chesterfield, in its early days, even had its share of witchcraft. Probably the last witch trial in America was held in Lancaster, South Carolina in 1813, before Judge David Johnson, who later became governor.
Barbara Powers, an old woman of Chesterfield, was accused of maltreating by diabolical arts a girl from Lancaster. The girl testified, "being fatigued one evening . . . I lay down to rest; Barbara Powers . . . choked me with great violence. After this, she raised me up, converted me into a horse and rode me to Lancaster.
"At Lancaster, she went through the keyhole into several shops, brought our goods of great value, loaded me with them and rode me into Chesterfield with her booty."
"Then she rode me to Cheraw . . . and then rode me back to her residence."Copied from...
http://chesterfield-sc.com/History%2008.htmWhich has some interesting stuff about the sandhills of SC.

Logged
“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism’, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.†- Norman Thomas, U.S. Socialist Party presidential candidate 1940, 1944 and 1948
"America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within." Stalin