It is surprising that New Hampshire’s monument to Hannah Duston, dedicated in 1874 by Governor James A. Weston and a broad group of lawyers, clergy and businessmen, should suddenly spark calls for its erasure from our historical record. The 39-year-old mother’s escape from captivity was grim, bold and desperate, matching the ferocity of the March 15, 1697, native raid on Haverhill that abducted her, her midwife, and her ill-fated newborn daughter. And which claimed the lives of 27 Haverhill villagers plus several abductees including Hannah’s infant.
My ancestor was not the first female survivor of native raids on colonial New England organized by the French during this tumultuous period, but she was the first to escape captivity through her own actions, not ransomed through French priests or officials. Accordingly, her resolute actions made her a candidate for a certain amount of celebrity — or notoriety — and her story was breathlessly recounted by Cotton Mather, John Greenleaf Whittier, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau, among other literary luminaries.
The island site where her memorial stands is owned by the New Hampshire Bureau of Historic Sites, which in 2020 convened an 11-member advisory committee comprising native representatives, women’s historians and anthropologists, Duston descendants and other site stakeholders. Its declared object was to augment the memorial site to provide missing educational context about the lives of English colonists and the indigenous people “who occupied the shores of the Merrimack River long before colonization, and the era in which the statue was constructed.”
Regular public meetings of this committee were held from late 2020 through August 2021. Dr. Barbara Cutter, a women’s historian who has published about the emergent notoriety of Hannah Duston, was a committee member. So were Craig Richardson and I, New Hampshire residents and Duston descendants affiliated with the family association, which does not and never did erect or own the Boscawen statue.
The meetings were constructive and amicable, and continued until State Chair Andrew Cushing announced his immediate departure to the membership in early June 2022, without reference to a successor. There were no calls for removal of Hannah’s statue, only the addition of exhibits which would provide missing historical context about the era of native conflict and indigenous society in that time. Meeting minutes will confirm that all parties were in general agreement as to a course of action.
Wholesale deletion of this footnote in colonial American history is not a quest one would associate with the dominant political agenda in our State House. But before time and expense are wasted on removal of this New Hampshire monument to a female captive determined to escape enslavement, I would recommend that the Hannah Duston Site Advisory Committee be reconstituted so that important progress on this subject can be resumed. And so that the actions of all parties in 1697 finally can be viewed through a fair lens of history.
David Dustin is an 11th generation descendant of Hannah Duston and was a founding member of the state’s Hannah Duston Site Advisory Committee.