Indian Raid of 1695

Type	War
Date	August 5, 1695

The Indian Raid of 1695 was the second and larger of the two attacks made on Billerica during King William's War (1688 to 1697). On August 5, 1695, raiders fell on the families east of the Concord River near what is now North Billerica, killing ten people and carrying four into captivity from the Rogers, Levistone and Toothaker households. It came three years after the first attack (see Indian Raid of 1692), and Henry Hazen called it the town's second massacre. By the Gregorian calendar the date fell on August 15, 1695, a Monday.

The second raid came about noon on August 5, 1695. Cotton Mather, as quoted by John Farmer, reported that the attackers were on horseback and so were not taken for Indians until they reached the houses. They found John Rogers, about 53 and a widower, asleep at the John Rogers Homestead, north of the present village; an arrow struck him in the neck, and he pulled it out and died with it in his hand. A woman in the chamber escaped by leaping from the window and hiding among the flags, and a young woman was scalped and left for dead but survived. His son Daniel, 12, and daughter Mercy were taken captive. The family of John Levistone suffered most: his wife's mother, Seeth Ross, a widow of four months, was killed with five of the children, Seth, Thomas, Mary, Margaret and Alexander, the youngest about five weeks old, while the eldest daughter Sarah, 11, was carried off; the parents, Margaret and John, and their eldest son John escaped. Thomas Rogers, John's younger brother, and his son Thomas, about ten, were killed, probably away from their house. At the Roger Toothaker House, at the point where the Middlesex Canal later left the Concord River, Mary Toothaker was killed and her youngest daughter Margaret, 12, taken prisoner. The town clerk, Joseph Tompson, entered in the records that the town had "received that awful stroke by the enemy of fivetene persons slain & taken, more sad than that we met withall three years before." Fourteen of the fifteen are named; the other has not been identified.

Men from the center of town pursued at once but found no trace of the raiders, who were said to have tied their dogs' mouths with wampum to keep them from barking. Alarm continued for weeks. On August 23, 1695, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Lynde of Charlestown, commissioned by Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, came to Billerica and found about three hundred armed men from Woburn, Reading, Malden, Medford, Charlestown, Cambridge and Watertown. He posted about forty men at each of the three fords of the Merrimack between Andover and Chelmsford, camped at Prospect Hill, and on August 24 had the great swamp searched in line, finding only a track of perhaps two Indians. He left ten men to guard the chief ford below Hunt's garrison until August 29 and dismissed the rest at the ordinary; his report noted that the bread left with Captain Danforth had not been prudently used. On April 6, 1696, the officers erected new watches, ordered the garrisons repaired with masters and soldiers assigned to each, and divided the town's old powder among them. Samuel Hunt's house near Wamesit, at Hunt's Falls on the Merrimack, was a garrison and, from its exposed position, probably the most important one.

No further attack fell on Billerica before the peace of 1697, and Hazen found no evidence that either raid had been preceded by warnings or accompanied by attacks on other towns. The sites remained part of local memory: in 1883 Hazen wrote that the well of the John Rogers house could still be seen and English bricks dug from its cellar, and that tradition held the Toothaker house to survive as the ell of the brick Rogers house on the canal. The Levistone family remained in the town, and John Levistone's descendants were numerous there. Farmer, writing in 1816, recorded that the shock of the second raid "was long had in painful remembrance."

People

John Rogers: Killed at his house August 5, 1695; son Daniel and daughter Mercy taken captive.
Thomas Rogers: Younger brother of John Rogers; killed with his son Thomas August 5, 1695.
Seeth Holman Ross: Widow of Thomas Ross and mother of Margaret Levistone; killed August 5, 1695.
John Levistone: Scotchman whose five younger children were killed and daughter Sarah captured August 5, 1695; he escaped.
Margaret Ross Levistone: Wife of John Levistone, born Margaret Ross; escaped the 1695 raid.
John Levistone: Eldest son of John and Margaret Levistone, born 1682; escaped the 1695 raid.
Mary Allen Toothaker: Born Mary Allen; accused of witchcraft 1692; killed August 5, 1695; daughter Margaret taken captive.
Joseph Tompson: Town clerk in 1695 who entered the record of the second raid.
Samuel Hunt: Master of Hunt's garrison near Wamesit, the guard post at the Merrimack ford in 1695.

Indian Raid of 1695

Indian Raid of 1695

People

References