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Discover the Hidden History All Around You

You wouldn’t want to see one of New England’s historic buildings, landscapes or icons without knowing about its hidden past, would you?

New England has plenty of landmarks with obvious history, from taverns and meetinghouses to mill yards and monuments. But New England is even more drenched in history than you might imagine.

That road you take to work might have once been trod by French soldiers during the Revolutionary War. A child might have gone to the gallows by that statue you just passed. A world-famous architect, now forgotten, might have designed that pretty church you saw.

The New England Historical Society has regularly posted a feature listing six such noteworthy items, hidden or otherwise. Each New England state gets one. The Six Oldest Houses. Six Mysterious Stone Structures. Six Landmark Signs. Six Irish Landmarks. You get the picture.

New England’s Hidden Past

Now, New England Historical Society authors Dan and Leslie Landrigan have compiled 60 lists of six landmarks into a book called, New England’s Hidden Past: 360 Overlooked, Underappreciated, and Misunderstood Landmarks. If you travel anywhere in New England, this would be a handy book to have around. Looking for a scenic drive for some leaf-peeping in fall? You could take an old Indian trail. Fascinated by the Underground Railroad? Here are six stops.

Trying to find one of each hidden landmark in each New England state can be tricky, especially when Vermont and Rhode Island are so small. But a list of revolutionary forts takes you to the top of Mount Independence in Orwell, Vt., for one of the largest, least disturbed revolutionary sites in America. A list of places where gallows once stood takes you to the spot on a Rhode Island sidewalk where 26 pirates met their maker – all in one day.

New England’s Hidden Past takes readers to the grave sites of revolutionary heroines, Loyalist houses, stagecoach stops, historic department stores, ghost towns and Little Italys. Anyone who loves New England history will love this book.

Order it here and you’ll help local bookstores and the New England Historical Society.

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Alice Bishop, Pilgrim Murderess, Kills her 4-Year-Old Daughter

The mystery of why Alice Bishop cut her four-year-old daughter’s throat in Plymouth Colony still lingers 370 years later.

Alice didn’t deny that she did it. In fact, she confessed right away when a neighbor saw the pool of blood on the floor of her home.

She had, apparently, been a good Pilgrim mother up until then. But she did it, and she hanged for it in the fall of 1648 at the Duxbury Fair.

A Fair Puritan, chromalithograph, by Pery Moran (detail)

Donna A. Watkins, a descendant of Alice Bishop, tells the story of her life in her book Diverse Gashes. Though Watkins doesn’t have a definitive answer, she does sort through the difficulties the Pilgrims’ endured just to survive. She especially focuses on the struggles faced by Pilgrim women to run the house and family while remaining subservient to men and achieving godly perfection—all under the prying eyes of the neighbors.

Alice Bishop

Alice first appears in the historical record as “Alice Martin” on the day she married George Clarke–Jan. 22, 1639 (N.S.).

Watkins believes Alice Bishop may have been related to William Bradford, who served as Plymouth’s governor on and off for 30 years and wrote Of Plimoth Plantation. How, or when, she arrived in Plymouth—or even whether she was born there—isn’t known. But her absence from the Pilgrims’ records suggests she didn’t cause trouble or engage in ‘unseemly behavior,’ Watkins argues.

Alice’s new husband George Clarke had bought a 10-acre plot of land with a small wooden house on it in a neighborhood called Playne Dealing, two miles north of Plymouth. George farmed, Alice tended the house. That meant getting up before dawn, building a fire, cooking over an open hearth, hauling water, spinning hemp or flax or grinding corn.

She gave birth to their first child, Abigail, in 1643. Her second, the ill-fated Martha, was born in 1644. George Clarke died, probably suddenly, around then.

A replica house in Plymouth Colony, similar to the one Alice Bishop lived in.

On Dec. 5, 1644, the widowed Alice Clarke married Richard Bishop, a hired man. It wasn’t unusual for widowed spouses to remarry quickly in colonial New England. The Bishops’ daughter Damaris was born in 1646. Richard and Alice seemed to get along, as no records exist of trouble between them.

Alice Bishop, Murderess

On Saturday, July 22, 1648, Alice Bishop would have been cooking meals for two days, since the Pilgrims forbade cooking on Sunday. Her husband was probably working in the fields. Abigail, then six, may have helped her mother with the chores.

Then a neighbor, 23-year-old Rachel Ramsden, stopped by the house to visit. Rachel noticed four-year-old Martha asleep on her bed. Alice gave her a kettle and asked her to borrow some buttermilk from Goodwife Winslow.

Alice had seemed normal, Rachel later testified. But when she returned, Alice seemed ‘sad and dumpish.’ Then Rachel noticed blood at the foot of the ladder leading to the attic. She asked about the blood. Alice pointed upstairs and told her to look.

Rachel, not seeing Martha in the bed, feared Alice had killed her, so she ran home to tell her parents. Her parents notified William Bradford, who quickly assembled three other men into a posse and went to the Bishop’s house.

The men later declared to the court what they saw: “…at the foot of a ladder which leads into an upper chamber, much blood; and going up, all of us, into the chamber, we found a woman child of about four years of age lying in her shift upon her left check with her throat cut with diverse gashes cross ways[.]”

The men then described the savagery of the attack: “…the wind pipe cut and stuck into the throat downward, and a bloody knife lying by the side of the child[.]”

They concluded that Alice Bishop had killed the child with the knife, and she confessed to them that she had.

But Why?

Donna Watkins notes that the court records tell us nothing about why Alice Bishop killed Martha Clarke. One possible explanation: Her older daughter did it, and Alice took the fall for it.

But Watkins delves further into another explanation. Perhaps Alice just suddenly lost control under the demands of constant physical labor, motherhood, marriage, a mixed family, snooping neighbors and the community’s expectations of perfect behavior. And to make it even harder to live in that overcontrolled Puritan environment, Alice Bishop as a woman only ranked as a second-class citizen.

The Pilgrims, Watkins noted, expected complete domestic harmony. Court records show plenty of actions against neighbors, but few against family or household members. “They controlled their emotions at home at the expense of their relationships with their neighbors,” wrote Watkins.

She speculated that Rachel Ramsden, the neighbor, could have said something critical of Alice Bishop. Perhaps Martha should have been up and awake by then. And perhaps four-year-old Martha misbehaved, which caused Alice Bishop to suddenly fly into an uncontrolled rage and take a knife to her daughter’s throat.

William Bradford

William Bradford, then governor, may have had Alice Bishop in mind when he wrote about the reasons for evil to appear in Plymouth Colony. “…[A]s it is with waters when their streams are stopped or dammed up. When they get passage they flow with more violence and make more noise and disturbance than when they are suffered to run quietly in their own channels.”

William Bradford

Bradford wrote those words between 1648 and 1650, around the time Alice Bishop went to the gallows for murdering her daughter. At that time, Bradford had sunk into sadness and despair. Many of the original Pilgrims had died, Plymouth had shrunk and settlers had scattered into new towns. It was then that he stopped writing Of Plimoth Plantation.

Watkins argues, plausibly, that the murder of Martha Clarke and the hanging of Alice Bishop, possibly his relatives, contributed to his depression.

Donna A. Watkins in her book Diverse Gashes: Governor William Bradford, Alice Bishop, and the Murder of Martha Clarke, Plymouth Colony, 1648, explores the reasons Alice Bishop may have slashed her four-year-old daughter’s throat.

Images: House and fence in Plimoth By Ben Franske – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4459090.

This story was updated in 2022.

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A Sad Condition: Wilmot Redd and the Salem Witch Trials

In 1692, Wilmot Redd died on the gallows because her neighbors didn’t like her.

Redd (or Reed/Read, by some accounts) was the only victim of the Salem witch trials who lived in Marblehead, Mass., Salem’s neighbor to the south. Townspeople singled her out for persecution because she had made a bad impression on many of them.

Wilmot Redd

Redd, born sometime in the early seventeenth century, lived in a modest house near the foot of Old Burial Hill in Marblehead with her husband, fisherman Samuel Redd. She lived next to a small pond that now bears her name (Redd’s Pond). Redd developed a reputation for being ornery and unlikeable.

Redd’s Pond

She sometimes sold butter to supplement her husband’s small income. Either her butter was of poor quality or she was wrongfully blamed for it turning sour after she sold it. Regardless, she fell out with some of her neighbors over the issue.

She was also known to be irritable and curt. She became the subject of superstitious tales that circulated around Marblehead and Salem. In some of them, people accused her of using curses to kill babies and curdle her neighbors’ milk. One rhyme survives that hints at her reputation:

Old Mammy Redd
Of Marblehead
Sweet milk could turn
To mold in churn.

Witchcraft Charges

Redd was first accused of witchcraft in 1687, but nothing came of that accusation.

A few years later, however, in 1692, witch hysteria swept the region. Redd’s reputation inspired some of the young Salem girls who instigated the Salem witch trials to name her as one of their tormenters.

Like other Salem witch trial victims (Bridget Bishop and Ann Pudeator, for example), Redd’s unpopularity made her an easy target. It probably did not help that Redd’s daughter married another accused witch, the Rev. George Burroughs. He was eventually hanged.

A local constable arrested Wilmot Redd on May 28, 1692. Two judges signed her arrest warrant: John Hathorne, the patrilineal ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Jonathan Corwin. Three days after her arrest, authorities took Redd to Deacon Nathan Ingersoll’s house and tavern in Salem Village. Ingersoll had accused at least seven witchcraft defendants.

As soon as Redd arrived, four girls who had accused her of witchcraft (Abigail Williams, Mercy Lewis, Ann Putnam and Mary Walcott) fell into fits. According to official records of this “examination,” Redd was asked what she thought was wrong with the girls. She responded, “I cannot tell.” Asked again to give her opinion, she said, “My opinion is they are in a sad condition.” When Redd touched the girls, their fits miraculously stopped.

The Trial of Wilmot Redd

Three Marbleheaders — Sarah Doddy, Ambrose Gale and Charity Pitman — testified against Redd at her trial four months later. Pitman claimed Redd had cursed a neighbor with “distemper of the dry bellyache” (constipation). The neighbor, a Mrs. Simse/Syms, had accused a girl staying with Redd (possibly a servant) of stealing some of Simse’s linen. Redd had supposedly met her at her door with a litany of curses.

The Salem girls present at Redd’s examination in Salem also formally accused her of choking and pinching them and causing other bodily harm. Mary Walcott testified that “…if [Redd] did but look upon me she would strike me down or almost choke me.” The girls gave nearly identical testimony, all painting Redd as their assailant.

The court indicted Wilmot Redd for “detestable arts called Witchcraft and Sorceries…practiced & exercised at the Towne of Salem.”

The Salem witch trials

Guilty

Redd had no defense counsel at her trial. The court found her guilty on Sept. 17, 1692, and sentenced her to death by hanging.

On Sept. 22, 1692, Redd belonged to the last group of victims executed during the Salem witchcraft trials. Authorities brought her and seven others to Gallows Hill. The cart carrying the condemned got stuck as it made its way up to the execution site. Some of the victims’ accusers, who had assembled to watch them die, then cried out the devil was trying to hold back the cart and save the witches.

With their last words, the victims proclaimed their innocence, just as they had done during their trials.

Redd was buried in an unmarked grave. Its location remains unknown. Today, markers memorialize Redd at Old Burial Hill in Marblehead and at the Salem Witch Trials Memorial. Then in 2016, archaeologists confirmed her execution site at Proctor’s Ledge below Gallows Hill in Salem. Markers now memorialize the victims there as well.

Wilmot Redd memorial

In the centuries following the witch trials, political figures pardoned the victims as a gesture of remorse for their wrongful deaths. On Halloween in 2001, Massachusetts Acting Gov. Jane Swift signed a bill that pardoned five witch trial victims, including Wilmot Redd.

This story last updated in 2022. The author of this story, Rebecca Del Giudice, is a writer and editor who lives in Massachusetts.

Sources

Brooks, Rebecca Beatris. “The Execution of Wilmot Redd.” History of Massachusetts Blog.
https://historyofmassachusetts.org/wilmot-redd-salem/ Last accessed September 21, 2019.

Bultrusis, Sam. Wicked Salem: Exploring Lingering Lore and Legends. Guildford, Connecticut: Globe Pequot, 2019.

Gamage, Virginia Clegg and Lord, Priscilla Sawyer. The Spirit of ’76 Lives Here: Marblehead. Radnor, PA: Chilton Book Company, 1972. P. 52.

Ray, Benjamin. Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project. University of Virginia. SWP 114.1-9 http://salem.lib.virginia.edu/n114.html Last accessed September 25, 2019.

Roads, Samuel Jr. The History and Traditions of Marblehead. Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1880.

Images: Wilmot Redd Memorial: Keitei at the English Language Wikipedia; Redd’s Pond: By Elizabeth B. Thomsen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51908871.

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New England Witchcraft Trials: It Wasn’t Just Salem

Plenty of people in early New England were persecuted for witchcraft, and not just in Salem, Mass.

Witches had troubled the European colonists from the get-go. In 1635, Plymouth Colony made it a crime to “form a solemn compact with the devil by way of witchcraft.” As late as the 19^th century, women were persecuted for cursing butter churns, making animals sick and causing people to die.

“Examination of a witch” by Tompkins Harrison Matteson (1853)

Salem’s witchcraft hysteria was just the most spectacular (and certainly the most memorable) of the witch trials. Two hundred people faced charges, and 20 died at the executioner’s hand. But Hartford had its own mini-witch hysteria, as did many towns scattered throughout New England.

Connecticut Witchcraft Prosecutions

In Connecticut, witch hysteria took hold 45 years before Salem began its mass executions. The colony formally tried 43 people for witchcraft (Massachusetts tried 50.) Most were acquitted or escaped, but nine men and two women were executed as witches between 1647 and 1663. The first, a woman from Windsor named Alse Young, died, as the others would, on the basis of flimsy evidence. She went to the gallows on the site of the Old State House.

The witch hysteria peaked during the “Hartford Witch Panic.” It started in 1662 when a young Hartford girl died after claiming a neighbor, Goodwife Ayres, tormented her. In 1662, Goodwife Ayres and her husband sensibly skipped town.

More accusations followed for the next 50 years in the Connecticut River towns of Hartford, Windsor, Farmington and Wethersfield. Most, however, resulted in acquittals as Connecticut judges came to their senses.

By 1715, the law making witchcraft a capital offense was off the books, and the witchcraft hysteria died down. (Click here for more about the Hartford Witch Panic.)

The Witch No. 1, lithograph, J.E. Baker.

Disturbing Witches

Your chances of getting hauled into court for witchcraft got better if your neighbors didn’t like you. Often the people accused of dealing with the devil were shrewish or grouchy or arrogant. Sometimes they lived on a town’s margins, and took the blame for its misfortunes.

Eunice Cole of Hampton, N.H., was difficult, unlikeable and didn’t have much money. From 1656 to 1680 she went to court three times to face charges. She was in and out of prison for slanderous speech and familiarity with the devil. She did perform one near-magic feat: dying peacefully in her own bed at the age of 90. (Read more about Eunice Cole here.)

Just because a jury found you not guilty of witchcraft didn’t mean your persecution ended. A Boston jury exonerated Mary Webster of Hadley, Mass., but that didn’t stop her neighbors from disturbing her.

The Puritans believed ‘disturbing’ witches – beating or restraining them – prevented them from casting spells. Mary Webster’s neighbors dragged her from the house, hanged her from a tree until she nearly died, than buried her in the snow and left her. She survived, and spent the rest of her life known as ‘Half-Hanged Mary.’

Mary Webster was lucky compared to Susannah Martin of Amesbury, Mass. A neighbor first accused her of witchcraft in 1669. Susannah’s husband sued the neighbor for slander, and ultimately she was cleared of the charges. But the taint of the accusation lingered, and she was charged again during the Salem witchcraft hysteria of 1692. She died on the gallows at the age of 70 with three other accused witches. (Read about Susannah Martin here.)

Court of Oyer and Terminer

In Salem and nearby towns, officials began rounding up suspected witches even before Gov. William Phips ordered the Court of Oyer and Terminer convened.

William Phips

As the storm gathered, Philip English may have been a target because of his wealth. Essex County’s High Sheriff George Corwin had a nasty habit of seizing the property of accused witches and dividing the spoils with his deputies.

Corwin arrested Philip English’s wife Mary on April 18, 1692. Five weeks later, the Court of Oyer and Terminer was formed to investigate the disturbances in Salem. (Read more about it here.) The court quickly turned into a killing machine.

Philip English followed his wife to jail when a neighbor accused him of witchcraft. She said he pinched her and threatened to kill her if she didn’t touch his ‘Devil’s book.’ Philip and Mary English managed to flee to New York until the bloodshed ended.

Two hundred (perhaps a few more) were charged in what historians now believe was a massive case of petty jealousies and score settling. Nineteen died by hanging, one man was crushed to death and five people died in jail.

The Salem bloodlust

But then the Puritan leaders came to their senses and realized the witchcraft trials were a shocking case of government run amok — and an embarrassment. After the 20 alleged witches were executed in Salem, Mass., no one was indicted, convicted or executed for witchcraft in New England. One of the witch trial judges, Samuel Sewall, even apologized for his role in the witch hysteria. (Read about Judge Sewall here.)

Samuel Sewall.

Witchcraft After the Trials

That didn’t mean people stopped believing in witches. Rhoda Dustin was known as the Witch of Weare, N.H., but lived in an era when witchcraft prosecutions had died down. She was born in 1736, and with her husband ran an inn. The townspeople believed she could fly, inflict illness on people and curse butter churns so they wouldn’t make butter. Though they gossiped about her and tried to counteract her curses, she was never tried and died peacefully in Vermont in 1824.

Hannah Cranna, like Susannah Martin and Eunice Cole, was a shrew. But she was born nearly a century after the witch trials ended, in 1783. Hannah married Capt. Joseph Hovey, probably much older than she, and they lived in Monroe, Conn.

Hannah Cranna’s headstone.

No whisperings of witchcraft followed her until her husband died suspiciously. He went out for a walk one night and fell over a cliff in an area he knew well. People thought she’d cast a spell on him.

From then on, Hannah lived in poverty, and used her reputation for witchcraft to extort food and firewood from her neighbors. She never went to trial, though neighbors talked about her.

When she died, her neighbors ignored her wishes and buried her after sundown. When they returned to her house, it had gone up in flames, sealing the legend of Hannah Cranna, witch. (Read more about Hannah Cranna here.)

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Curse of Humphrey Atherton

Humphrey Atherton had far more power and influence than the Quakers he persecuted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the 1650s.

At least one of his victims, Mary Dyer, has gone down in history as a courageous woman whose stand against religious intolerance cost her her life.

Her statue stands in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse, and schoolchildren learn of her martyrdom to this day.

Statue of Mary Dyer in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse.

As for Humphrey Atherton, he is remembered mostly for his violent death, said to result from a curse placed on him by one of his victims.

Humphrey Atherton

He was born in England sometime around 1608 and came to Massachusetts during the Great Migration of Puritans. He brought with him his wife, who he had married when they were both 15. They had three children, and would have nine more.

Puritans arrive in Massachusetts, ‘Arrival of Winthrop’s Company in Boston Harbor’ by William Formby Halsall, ca. 1630.

Humphrey Atherton quickly rose to power in the young colony. He won election as selectman and treasurer and eventually served as Speaker of the House. For many years he served as a justice of the peace. He officiated over many marriages, including that of Myles Standish, Jr., and Sarah Winslow.

Atherton belonged to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company and organized the first militia in Dorchester. He became the highest ranking military officer in New England. As major-general in the Suffolk Regiment, his responsibilities included subduing Indians and catching criminals, like Quakers.

Humphrey Atherton also served as a member of the Court of Assistance. That gave him the power to prosecute criminals and heretics. He embraced that power with gusto.

He played a major role in the capital punishment of at least one witch, Mrs. Ann Hibbins. She later appeared as Mrs. Hibbins in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

Quakers especially resented Humphrey Atherton’s insult toward Mary Dyer. As her body dangled from the noose, Atherton supposedly said, “She hangs there like a flag.”

Mary Dyer headed to the gallows.

Death

According to legend, Wenlock Christison, the last Quaker sentenced to death, had an exchange with Humphrey Atherton.

Joseph Besse, an English Quaker who chronicled the sufferings of Quakers, wrote about it.

Humphrey Atherton said to Christison, “You pronounce woes and judgments, and those that are gone before you pronounced woes and judgments; but the judgments of the Lord God are not upon us yet.”

Christison then told Atherton he would face God’s judgment. Christison, however, won a reprieve.

On Sept. 16, 1661, Atherton drilled his militia with ‘much pomp and ostentation.’ He then rode his horse home through Boston Common. He came to the place where officials released Quakers from a cart after they whipped them.

His horse suddenly shied, and threw Humphrey Atherton with such violence that he died instantly. Wrote Besse:

His eyes being dashed out of his head, and his brains coming out of his nose, his tongue hanging out at his mouth, and the blood running out at his ears.

Men took up his body and brought it into the courthouse where he had sentenced Quakers to death. “His blood ran through the floor,” wrote Besse, “exhibiting to the spectators a shocking instance of the Divine vengeance against a daring and hardened persecutor.”

Afterward

Humphrey Atherton’s remains now lie in the Old North Burying Ground in the Dorchester section of Boston. Harlow Elliot Woodword, in Epitaphs from the Old Burying Ground in Dorchester, wrote that Quakers ‘believed his horrible death to be God’s visitation of wrath.’

The tomb of Humphrey Atherton.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow included the curse of Humphrey Atherton in his play, John Endicott.

His descendants include rocket scientist Robert Goddard, suffragist Susan B. Anthony, U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and actress Raquel Welch.

Images: Tomb of Humphrey Atherton By Ishtar456 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11255440. This story was updated in 2023.

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New Hampshire’s Infanticides of 1739

The discovery of New Hampshire’s infanticides began on Saturday, Aug. 11, 1739, when someone found a dead infant girl in a well on the outskirts of Portsmouth.

Suspicion immediately fell on Sarah Simpson, a 27-year-old widow. She probably had little money, as she had spent her childhood as an indentured servant. Her neighbors suspected her of concealing a pregnancy.

But that was just the beginning. Simpson said she hadn’t delivered a baby girl and, to prove it, she led the constable to a spot near the Piscataqua River. There they found the shallow grave of her infant son. Infanticide? She insisted she had delivered him stillborn.

Nevertheless, the constable arrested Sarah Simpson and charged her with concealing the death of her child.

An Epidemic of Child Deaths

The New Hampshire colonists had a heightened sensitivity to the loss of young children. The colony in 1739 had experienced four years of an epidemic of throat distemper, which mostly killed children.

Across New England some 5,000 people died of diphtheria between 1735 and 1740. Three out of four were children. In New Hampshire, where it struck first and worst, 75 out of every 1,000 people died of it. In Portsmouth, the disease killed 80 children under 10.

Infanticides

If Sarah Simpson hadn’t killed the baby girl, who had? The next day, officials questioned Penelope Kenny, the 20-year-old servant of Dr. Joseph Franklin. They suspected her of throwing the baby down the well.

She, too, denied it. The magistrates ordered her examined by several women, probably midwives who believed she gave birth to a child within the past week.

After a night in jail, Sarah Simpson confessed to giving birth to a baby—but a baby boy. She said she ‘put it alive into a tub in her Master’s Cellar and then left it, till Friday-Night following, when she threw it into the River.’

The shocking infanticides (if Sarah Simpson was lying) no doubt resulted from the women’s fears of harsh punishment for having extramarital sex. They probably thought concealing their pregnancies a matter of survival.

But killing and hiding an illegitimate baby brought an even worse punishment than loss of income. In 1714, the New Hampshire General Court passed a law against infanticides, called “An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children.”

“Whereas many lewd women that have been delivered of Bastard children, to avoid shame and escape punishment, do secretly bury or conceal the death of their children …shall suffer Death.”

They allowed one exception: “except such Mother cann make proof by one witness at least, the Child whose death was by her so intended to be concealed was born dead.”

Guilty

Three weeks after the discovery of the dead child, a jury found Sarah Simpson and Penelope Kenny guilty of concealing the deaths of their children.

Chief Justice Henry Sherburn ordered the infanticides hanged by the neck until they were dead.

The Henry Sherburn house in Portsmouth. Courtesy Library of Congress.

On Dec. 27, 1739, an executioner hanged first Sarah Simpson, then Penelope Kenny, before a large crowd in a field covered with snow.

The mournful spectacle included sermons, confessions of guilt and the anguished deaths of the two women. The infanticides were the first judicial executions in New Hampshire history.

Mysteries

But several mysteries remained: Who had thrown the baby girl into the well? Some still suspected Penelope Kenny as the culprit. And who had fathered the dead children? No evidence exists that suggests officials tried to find out. The women apparently took the secret to their graves.

Between 1623 and 1800, New England executed 29 women, mostly white servants or enslaved African-Americans, for infanticide.

Thanks to The Story of the First Executions in New Hampshire’s History by Christopher Benedetto. This story was updated in 2022.

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