18. Massachusetts was prompt in erecting a statue of its own
With New Hampshire celebrating what some had the temerity to call the Granite State Heroine, patriotic leaders of Haverhill, no doubt imbued with civic pride, led a movement to honor Hannah Duston properly in her hometown of Haverhill. In 1879 a statue of Hannah in bronze was created and placed at the site where her church had once stood, in what was then Haverhill’s town square. The statue was created by Calvin Weeks, who created several monuments around the town of Haverhill, including the town’s 1869 Soldier’s Monument. Calvin, as with Mr. Andrews before him, needed to fall back on artistic license to envision what Hannah may have looked like, and his version of her appearance includes a somewhat more angry visage than that displayed in New Hampshire.
Hannah does bear an axe in the Haverhill statue, brandished in perpetuity in her right hand. The bronze Hannah is also missing one shoe, in tune with an aspect of her legend which emerged in the early 1830s. Her own descriptions of Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall did not include that detail, and her legend has several versions of how she came about to be one shoe shy at the time of her vengeance against the Indians. Several additional statues and memorials followed, and both the axe she allegedly used to kill her captors (except that her captors had left her in the custody of other Indians) and the knife with which she took their scalps are on display for the interest to see.