Hanging Ruth Blay: An Eighteenth-Century New Hampshire Tragedy

The true story of a woman hanged in colonial Portsmouth for burying her stillborn out-of-wedlock baby.

On a cold December morning in 1768, thirty-one-year-old Ruth Blay approached the gallows for her execution. Standing on the high ground in the northwest corner of what is now 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 a child out of wedloc...