To Die Alone and Accused: The Roger Toothaker Story
By Alexander Ziwahatan, Descendant of Roger Toothaker
Moisture seeps through the mortar and slides down the wall like slow rain.
Dr. Roger Toothaker sits against the stone, his arms wrapped around his knees, and whispers to a God he can’t quite feel anymore.
“Why, Lord? Why give me hands to heal and then bind them here?”
His voice is rough, unused. The other prisoners are quiet now; one has stopped coughing, another mutters a psalm in sleep. Somewhere a chain clinks as the night guard passes. Then only the sea, breathing under the harbor timbers, and the stink of mildew and sweat that never leaves.
He has counted the days by the scraps of light that seep through the slit in the wall, but he no longer trusts the count. Since May 18, 1692, when the warrant came—
“for sundry acts of witchcraft upon the bodies of Elizabeth Hubbard, Ann Putnam, Mary Walcott, and others”—
time has been a blur of cold stone and fear.
He closes his eyes and tries to remember color: the green of comfrey, the gold of tansy, the blue of Mary’s apron fluttering on the line. He can still smell the mint he once crushed between his palms for a fevered child. The child had lived. Many did. He had asked nothing for it.
That, he thinks, was his crime—knowledge without license, mercy without permission.
He weeps then, silently at first. The tears trace through the grime on his cheeks and cool before they reach his chin. He presses his palms together and prays again.
“If I have sinned, show me how. If I am innocent, let someone remember.”
No answer. Only the slow drip of water and the sound of a rat nosing through the straw. His prayer turns into a list of names: Mary. Martha. Allin. Roger Jr. Andrew. Margaret. The family he will not see again.
He remembers the day the constables came to their door in Billerica. Dawn barely breaking, the knock too firm to be neighborly. Mary had stepped forward, her face pale beneath her kerchief. “You have the wrong man,” she said, but they didn’t. They had the right paper, signed and sealed. Five children watched as their father was led away.
The road to Salem was lined with fear. Every farm whispered stories of witches, every church sermon fed the fire. Roger, who had spent his life soothing the sick, was now called one of them. In their minds, a man who could heal could also harm.
In the jail they took his belt, his tools, the pouch of dried herbs he carried everywhere. They left him the Bible he always kept in his coat, though the pages soon curled from damp.
Days became nights without meaning. He marked them by the screams of the newly arrested—men and women dragged in, some from Andover, some from his own kin. Among them his sister-in-law Martha Carrier, fierce and proud, who would hang before summer’s end. And later, Mary, his wife, taken and broken under questioning. Her confession survives: she “freely confessed” to afflicting Timothy Swan and named companions she never knew. The handwriting on that page shakes like exhaustion.
Roger never saw her again.
The jailers said little. Food was a crust, water a mercy. When fever spread through the cells, he begged to help—he was a physician still—but they laughed. “No witch tends the sick,” one said, slamming the door.
He prayed harder then, asking not for freedom but for understanding.
“Was it pride to think I could mend Your children?” he asked the ceiling. “If so, forgive me. But if ignorance is their sin, forgive them too.”
Sometimes he dreamed of the garden behind their house—the rows of herbs, the bees heavy with pollen. In the dream he walked there barefoot, the soil warm, the air sweet. When he woke, the scent was gone, replaced by the reek of straw and iron. The dream was the only light left to him.
By June 16, 1692, the jail ledger notes simply: died in prison. No cause, no ceremony. History closed the door as firmly as the jailer had.
The World That Condemned Him
To understand Roger’s fate, you have to see the colony as it was in 1692: a world ruled by fear and faith in equal measure. Massachusetts Bay was still reeling from frontier wars, smallpox, and failed harvests. Every loss demanded a reason, and superstition offered one. The ministers of Salem Village preached that the Devil walked among them; the courts obliged by giving him names.
Roger’s kind of knowledge frightened people. He was no university physician—just a man who knew what grew in the meadows and what could ease a fever when the parson’s prayers failed. In Billerica town records he is listed simply as physician. In a different century he might have been called an herbalist or even a doctor of good repute. But in 1692, to heal outside the church’s sanction was to blur the line between godly and ungodly power.
The complaints that reached Salem were absurd in detail but deadly in consequence. Elizabeth Hubbard and the Putnam girls claimed his specter pinched and choked them in their sleep. Others swore he boasted that he could “hurt witches”—an idle statement twisted into proof of diabolical skill. His own wife’s family connection to Martha Carrier, already accused in Andover, sealed the rumor’s fate.
The magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne signed the order.
Apprehend Roger Toothaker of Billerica, charged with sundry acts of witchcraft upon the bodies of Elizabeth Hubbard, Ann Putnam, Mary Walcott, and others.
The parchment still exists, browned and brittle. Reading it now, I can trace the ink that cost him his life.
Once inside the Boston jail, he joined more than a hundred prisoners packed into a building meant for twenty. Contemporary reports describe the floor as earth, covered in straw that was never changed, and an air so foul that disease spread faster than rumor. Those who survived the summer did so by chance or by bribe. Roger did not. The June 1692 ledger entry reads only, Died in prison. Even the cause—fever, starvation, neglect—was unrecorded.
Mary’s Burden
Mary’s sister, Martha Carrier, refused to confess and was executed on August 19, 1692. Mary lived another year in custody, released in early 1693 when the new Superior Court of Judicature overturned many witchcraft convictions. She returned to a house emptied of its master and to children who had learned too young what fear looked like. Tradition says she died in 1695 during a frontier attack near Andover, though the record is uncertain.
The Children and the Healer’s Line
Their youngest son, Andrew Toothaker, born October 4, 1679, carried the family north after the century turned. He settled in Harpswell, Maine, married Abigail White, and raised a large family. Harpswell’s early deeds list him among the first settlers; the soil he farmed is still mapped with the Toothaker name. Through Andrew’s line the story survived, passed from parish to parish until it reached me.
The other children left fainter traces. Martha married; Roger Jr. and Allin appear briefly in Billerica’s church rolls, then disappear. The eldest daughter, Margaret, may have gone with relatives to Andover. None carried bitterness into print, but silence itself can be an inheritance.
The Healer’s Craft
Before fear made his work suspect, Roger’s medicine was the simplest kind: plants, water, patience, and prayer. Billerica’s meadows and woodlands were his apothecary. He gathered comfrey root to knit wounds, horehound for coughs, and feverfew for the pounding headaches brought by the summer heat. He dried angelica and sage on the rafters, wrapped sprigs of rosemary in linen, and brewed teas for new mothers too poor to pay a surgeon.
None of this was magic—it was memory, knowledge handed down from England’s country healers and sharpened by necessity in the New World. The same practices appear in 17th-century household manuals like Culpeper’s Herbal. Yet in Massachusetts, medicine outside the clergy’s control drew suspicion. When a child survived, people said he was blessed; when one died, they whispered that Roger’s herbs had failed because they were not godly enough.
By the 1690s, with war on the frontier and the colony short on ministers, that whisper had become a shout. Ordinary ailments became evidence. A birth that went wrong, a cow that sickened, a fever that spread—every loss needed a culprit. Those who understood nature too well were easiest to name.
The Web of Accusations
Fear traveled along family lines. Mary’s sister Martha Carrier had been outspoken in Andover politics; her defiance of local men made her an easy target. Once Martha was accused, her kin were suspect by association. The Toothakers, the Allins, and the Carriers formed one of the largest extended families drawn into the witchcraft panic—an entire network of mothers, sons, cousins, and in-laws stitched into the same net.
Historians note that Andover produced more accused “witches” than any other town. It was there that interrogations became factory work: one confession forcing another, each prisoner urged to name the next. When Mary Toothaker finally confessed under pressure, she likely believed that acknowledging guilt might spare her children. It was a cruel arithmetic that no one truly survived.
The records show that after Roger’s death the family property dwindled. His tools and livestock were gone; debts remained. No petition for restitution survives in his name, though in 1711 the Massachusetts legislature formally cleared most of the condemned and offered compensation to their heirs. Perhaps his children never knew, or perhaps the shame of those accusations still weighed too heavily for them to ask.
Echoes of 1692
Every generation rediscovers fear in a new disguise. Reading Roger’s case today, I see the same pattern repeated whenever knowledge threatens power: healers branded heretics, thinkers called dangerous, strangers made scapegoats for what a society cannot explain. The details change; the impulse does not.
In his world, herbs were condemned as witchcraft. In ours, truth itself can still be called subversive. The lesson that cost him his life is the one we keep relearning—that compassion without conformity is often punished first.
When I visit archives or walk through the old burying grounds of Essex County, I think of how many stories ended without stone or epitaph. Roger’s grave is unmarked; the prison where he died no longer stands. Yet the record of his name remains, and through it, the chance to tell his story as it should have been told.
Coda: The Breath of Memory
Sometimes, in the quiet before dawn, I imagine that cell again—not as a tomb, but as a place where faith and reason met and refused to yield. The damp air, the whispered prayers, the memory of a healer’s hands folded in the dark. His body perished, but his question did not. It lingers for all of us who inherit a world still wrestling with ignorance: What wrong have I done, except to heal?
Three centuries later, the answer is finally spoken aloud.
He did nothing wrong.
He was a man of mercy in an age of fear.
And now, remembered, he is free.
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