16. Memorials to Hannah Duston began to appear before the American Civil War
In the 1850s the town of Haverhill decided, through private subscription, to erect a memorial to its most famous resident. By that time Haverhill was a major textile center, and one of the leading manufacturers of shoes in the United States. A frontier town no longer, and with little to connect it to the heroic days of the Revolution in comparison to other Massachusetts towns, citizens of Haverhill raised the money to erect a statue of Hannah, a heroine in the struggle to seize a godless land from the heathen occupants and convert it into a shining example of pious industry. The statue, a simple column of marble, was erected in 1861, just as the American Civil War was beginning. Its subscriptions were never honored, and the stonecutter who provided it was never paid for his work.
By the end of the American Civil War, in August of 1865, the builders of the statue, unpaid and somewhat upset about it, removed the name of Hannah Duston from the column and the column itself from its pedestal. Countless cities and towns were at the time seeking memorials to the recently fallen during the Civil War, and the town of Barre, Massachusetts commissioned a new inscription on the marble column which had originally memorialized Hannah. The former Duston memorial became one to honor the dead of Barre during the recently completed unpleasantness with the Confederacy, and the column was moved to that town, erected in a ceremony overseen by the town’s fathers, and remains today as one of America’s venerated Civil War monuments.