The First French and Indian War, or King William’s War, brought terror in the form of massacre and abduction to colonists trying to settle the Merrimack Valley in the 1600s.
The war, which lasted from 1688 to 1697, was largely fought over the control of North America and its fur trade. England and its colonial and Iroquois allies fought France and the Abenaki tribe.
Born in December 1657 in Haverhill, Hannah Duston married Thomas Duston Jr., a farmer and brickmaker, at 20, and found herself captive after a deadly Abenaki raid.
In 1697, Haverhill was raided by a group of Abenaki that slaughtered almost 30 colonists and took 12 captive, including Duston, her newborn daughter Martha and her nurse Mary Neff.
The raiders killed Duston’s baby and took the rest of the captives to an island in the Merrimack River in Boscawen, New Hampshire, according to the account Duston gave to a Puritan clergyman.
Duston, Neff and a young Samuel Lennardson participated in an escape, “furnishing themselves with hatchets for the purpose, they struck home such blows upon the heads of their sleeping oppressors,” the account read.
The Massachusetts General Court voted to reward Duston with 25 pounds for her escape. What is believed to be the original hatchet Duston used can be found in Haverhill’s Buttonwoods Museum.
In 1879, a bronze statue of Duston grasping a hatchet was erected in Haverhill town square, now Grand Army of the Republic Park. It still stands on the site of the Haverhill Center Congregational Church, where Duston worshipped.
A monument sculpted by William Andrews honors Duston in Lowell at the Hannah Duston Memorial State Historic Site. Another statue of Duston was erected in Boscawen, New Hampshire, on a small island at the confluence of the Contoocook and Merrimack rivers where Duston was said to have escaped captivity.