13 Facts About Hannah Duston

Hannah Duston is believed to be the first American woman honored with a statue.

Hannah Duston used a hatchet to kill one of the two grown men, two adult women, and six children.

Wives had no legal status at that time in colonial New England, so her husband petitioned the Legislature on behalf of Hannah Duston, requesting that the bounties for the scalps be paid, even though the law providing for them had been repealed:.

Hannah Duston probably died between 1736 and 1738, and was most likely buried near Jonathan Duston's home.

Hannah Duston later published the story three times in five years: in Humiliations follow'd with Deliverances, Decennium Luctuosum, and in Magnalia Christi Americana.

Hannah Duston said her master, whom she kill'd did formerly live with Mr Roulandson at Lancaster.

Hannah Duston's story entered popular imagination along with other tales of violence perpetrated by women, sold as cheap works of short fiction or portrayed on stage in productions intended to appeal to working-class crowds.

The rebellion was illustrated in theatrical style in Junius Brutus Stearns' historical painting, Hannah Duston Killing the Indians in which Stearns, for reasons that remain unclear, depicted Samuel Lennardson as a woman.

Haverhill tradition, recorded in Mirick's History of Haverhill, adds the details that Hannah Duston was wearing only one shoe when she was captured, that her daughter was thrown against an apple tree from which local people remembered eating fruit, and that the captives had already started down the river when Hannah Duston insisted that they return to take the Indian scalps.

In 1879, a bronze statue of Hannah Duston grasping a hatchet was created by Calvin H Weeks in Haverhill town square, where it still stands on the site of the Haverhill Center Congregational Church, of which Hannah Duston became a member in 1724.

Hannah Duston died at this location circa 1736,1737 or 1738 and is believed to have been buried nearby.

The original small axe or hatchet held by Hannah Duston can be found today in the Buttonwoods Museum.

The Hannah Duston hatchet is not a tomahawk; it is usually called a Biscayan or biscayenne, a common trade item of the late 17th-century New England frontier.