Hannah Eastman

On July 15, 1752, Hannah Eastman died in Dudley, Massachusetts. Born in 1679, Hannah spent much of the first half of her life on the New England frontier, first in Haverhill, Massachusetts, then in Woodstock, Connecticut and nearby Dudley. Hannah was the daughter of Philip Eastman and Mary Barnard. Philip was the son of Roger Eastman, who emigrated to America from Langford, England in 1638.

England and its colonies were at war with France during most of Hannah's teenage years. King William's War raged from 1688 to 1697. When Hannah was seventeen years old in 1697, Haverhill was attacked by a band of Abenaki Indians allied with France. The Eastmans' home was among five houses burned to the ground. Philip and possibly Hannah herself were taken captive but escaped shortly afterward. But the 1697 Haverhill raid is famous for another Hannah. Hannah Duston escaped after killing ten of her captors during their long journey northward. For more on this event, see the recently published Massacre on the Merrimack: Hannah Duston's Captivity and Revenge in Colonial America by Jay Atkinson.

A new marks Hannah and James Corbin's grave in
Dudley, Mass. (FindAGrave.com)

Within a few weeks, the Eastman family moved to safer territory near the southern perimeter of the Massachusetts colony. Woodstock was a frontier village that had been settled eleven years earlier by emigrants from Roxbury near Boston. In Woodstock, Hannah met James Corbin. They were married in April only a few weeks after the Haverhill attack. James was a respected Woodstock citizen in his early 30s. However, despite moving to Woodstock, Hannah was not free of her fears regarding Indian attacks. Just one year before her arrival, an entire family had been killed in a surprise attack on the settlement of Oxford a short distance north of Woodstock. In the following year, Woodstock residents feared that some residents of the Wabbaquasset (Nipmuc) village adjacent to Woodstock had allied with hostile Indians from the north--the threat appears to have been unfounded. By this time, Hannah had experienced enough Indian violence that she was likely wary of them for the rest of her life--despite the fact that the Wabbaquassets were consistently peaceful and even allied themselves with the English against other native aggressors.

By the summer of 1697, Hannah was pregnant with the first of her eleven children, a son named Clement. She would be intermittently pregnant for many more years, finally giving birth to her last child, Hannah, at 41 years old. Shortly after that, Hannah and James moved a few miles north to the new settlement of Dudley (now in Massachusetts). Hannah survived her husband by 16 years, spending her final years in the household of her son, Samuel, in Dudley.