Hanging Ruth Blay: An Eighteenth-Century New Hampshire Tragedy

On a cold December morning in 1768, thirty-one-year-old Ruth Blay awaited her execution. Standing on the high ground in Portsmouth's old South Cemetery, she would have had a clear view across the pasture to the harbor and open sea. The eighteenth-century hanging of a schoolteacher for concealing the birth of an illegitimate child has appeared in local legend over the last few centuries, but the full account of Ruth's story has never been told. Drawing on over two years of investigative rese...