Indian Stones — A Birth on the Captive Trail, seventeen fifty-four
Near Woodstock, Vermont
A weathered slate stone on the roadside records one of colonial New England's most intimate moments of upheaval. On August thirtieth, seventeen fifty-four, at the height of the French and Indian War, a raiding party captured Captain James Johnson, his wife Susanna, and their family from their home in Charlestown, New Hampshire, and began marching them north toward Canada.
Somewhere near this spot in the Vermont wilderness, Susanna Johnson went into labor. The party halted and she gave birth to a daughter, whom the family named Captive. The stone, left here in seventeen ninety-nine, marks the place of that birth. Susanna later wrote a memoir of her captivity and eventual ransom, one of the few firsthand accounts to document the domestic terror of frontier raids on the Connecticut River Valley during the Seven Years War.
