One of the most important of the kitchen appliances in the early days was a butter churn. It was a piece of equipment that would agitate cream until it turned into butter. This can be done with an electric mixer in today’s world but in the olden days, churning was accomplished by womanpower. Churns were made in a variety of styles. Windham Historical Society has several models in its collection.

More than 200 years ago, residents in the little country town of Windham, like most Americans, were very superstitious and suspicious of anyone who exhibited skills that were different from the routine. Anyone who even appeared “different” was suspect.

A Windham historian of the early 1900s wrote about one of the neighbor families of his boyhood on River Road. In this family, the wife was regarded as a witch, someone to be feared because of her special powers. She was known to be an herbalist and “different.”

One day her next-door neighbor headed for the mill near today’s South Windham where he planned to have some of his corn ground into cornmeal. As he passed the suspected witch’s house, she came outside and asked him to wait so she could get some corn for him to also get ground for her. He was in such a hurry, he said he couldn’t wait and she pointed her finger at him and said, “You’ll be sorry for this!”

The man continued on, worried about the family he had left at home. When he departed that morning, his wife was churning cream to make butter and the children were doing their chores.

At the mill, there was quite a crowd and he had to wait longer than usual. By the time he returned home, it was dark – but unbelievably, his wife was still churning. The man knew that the witch in the neighborhood had caused the cream to remain liquid and he vowed to “teach her a lesson.”

After trying all known remedies to break the spell, he got a well-worn horseshoe, heated it red hot and put it into the churn. It is said that the cream became solid butter in less than five minutes and for two weeks, the woman known as a witch, wore a bandage on her hand to cover the terrible burn she mysteriously received.