This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
David Nagel has always passed the looming statue of Hannah Duston at the junction of the Contoocook and Merrimack Rivers whenever he went cycling in Boscawen. One day, he decided to read the sign in front of it — and couldn’t believe what he learned.
“I kind of went into shock when I saw it,” he said, adding that he did background research and spoke to historians after his discovery. “The more I learned, the worse it got.”
Nagel, a Republican state representative from Gilmanton, recently filed a legislative request to remove the statue.
Attempts to change the park’s name — the Hannah Duston Memorial Historic Site — or install new signage to reflect a more accurate accounting of what happened at the spot were championed a few years ago, but nothing came of it, Nagel said.
“If we’re not going to go in that direction and make a monument or memorial that’s more healing, healthy and acknowledging the sins of the past, perhaps on both sides of this equation, then I really think that it needs to go,” Nagel said.
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Based on historic accounts, Duston, from Haverhill, Mass., was kidnapped in 1697 by indigenous Abenaki people during King William’s War, one battle in a series of conflicts between English colonists, the French in Canada and Native Americans. Duston was captured with her neighbor, Mary Neff, and Duston’s newborn, who was killed shortly afterward.
The group traveled north for two weeks before being handed off to a Native American family that consisted of two men, three women and seven children. With that family was another captive, 14-year-old Samuel Leonardson from Worcester, Mass., kidnapped a year and a half earlier.
When the family went to bed one night, Duston, Neff and Leonardson slayed most of the family with tomahawks, cutting off the scalps of 10 members, including six children.
Her story was memorialized by puritan minister Cotton Mather between 1697 and 1702, praising Duston for her heroism and demonizing the Native American people. He championed the official narrative, including that her baby died at the hands of the Abenaki people. Over the decades, historians have questioned the accuracy of the account, partly because of Mather’s eagerness to justify violence against Native Americans.
The tale gained prominence in the 1820s when colonists expanded to the west in pursuit of their perceived Manifest Destiny. Biographies, magazines, and children’s books were written and even a mountain was dedicated to her. In 1874, a 25-foot-tall monument of Hannah Duston was erected in Boscawen, one of the first and oldest statues of a woman in the United States. Another statue in her hometown Haverhill was put up in 1902.
Nagel visited the statue on Thursday afternoon, looking up to see a woman in a flowy gown reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty or Lady Columbia. In her right hand, she clutches the scalps of the Native Americans she killed. Weathered with time, Duston’s nose has broken off and he features have become worn.
The representative, originally from New York and moved to New Hampshire 38 years ago, said he has worked closely with Native American people and historians around the state. His wife is a board member at the Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum in Warner.
As a professional doctor, he worked with the Indian Health Service for years and tried to create better access to health care for Native Americans in the state.
“I’m not native myself, obviously, but if I didn’t have that background of working with groups, exploring their sensitivities, things like that, I don’t know that I would have it would have hit me as hard,” he said. “I just found the monument incredibly insulting.”
A national movement has been brewing for years to remove or rename statues and monuments that memorialize controversial figures from the past. But Nagel isn’t in the camp to do away with every mention of Christopher Columbus or remove every head from Mount Rushmore. He said he believes they played a more significant role in the country’s history.
Duston doesn’t serve the same historical purpose, he said. Her story was revived over 100 years after her capture during a time when English colonists were taking over Native American land.
“I think we need to take people in their whole historical context,” Nagel said. “And I think her only historical context was this one action.”
Nagel’s legislative request will soon turn into a bill, which will then be scheduled for a hearing in January.
