The Hannah Duston monument in Boscawen has been vandalized once again, the latest chapter in a yearslong cycle of graffiti, debate, and cleanup that has drawn in state parks crews, local police, lawmakers in Concord, and Abenaki First Nations leaders. According to a report from NHPR, a vandal struck the statue in late April, spray painting the word “hate” in large letters across the base of the figure that depicts the colonial-era woman holding a tomahawk and a fistful of scalps.
It is far from the first time. Boscawen Police Chief Jason Killary told NHPR that vandals have hit the site at least a dozen times in recent years. The statue, sometimes described as the first publicly funded monument to a woman in the United States, sits on a small island in the Contoocook River near its confluence with the Merrimack, accessible only by foot via the Northern Rail Trail. That isolation is precisely what makes it both a tempting target and a difficult one to protect.
What Happened in Late April
The most recent incident came to light when state parks staff and Boscawen police were alerted to fresh spray paint defacing the granite base. Greg Keeler, marketing and communications director for New Hampshire State Parks, told NHPR that crews had already responded to the site three times by Friday. A member of the public, evidently trying to help, attempted to clean the graffiti before professional crews could arrive, and may have made the situation worse. Keeler said cleaning a monument of that age requires specific materials and training, and that well-meaning amateur efforts can drive paint deeper into the stone or strip away patina that cannot be restored.
“We appreciate the passion and the willingness to help out by somebody from the public who wants to see that clean, but that is definitely best left to us,” Keeler said.
The cleaning challenge is amplified by the site’s remote location. There is no electricity at the monument and no road access. State employees have to find a way to bring out a generator, water, and cleaning materials on foot or by hand cart along the rail trail, then perform stone conservation work in the open air. Each round of vandalism represents real cost to the state in labor and equipment, even before any conversation about the symbolism of the act itself.
Chief Killary said his department does not believe the recurring vandalism is the work of a coordinated group. In his estimation, the incidents are committed by individuals acting on their own, often under cover of darkness. That informal, lone-actor pattern is part of why the cases have been so hard to close.
Why the Statue Is Controversial
To understand why the Boscawen monument keeps drawing spray paint, you have to understand what it commemorates and why people still argue about it more than three centuries later. Hannah Duston, who lived in colonial Massachusetts, was captured during a March 1697 raid on Haverhill in King William’s War, a colonial-era conflict between English settlers and a coalition of French and Native American forces. Historical accounts, including the often-cited record by Cotton Mather, describe how Duston’s newborn child was killed during the raid. She was marched north with her captors and held on an island in the Merrimack River, the spot now memorialized in Boscawen.
What followed is the part that has fueled centuries of controversy. According to those accounts, Duston, along with two other captives, killed and scalped ten of their captors, including women and children, before fleeing south. She returned to Massachusetts, presented the scalps to colonial authorities, and was paid a bounty. The Boscawen statue, erected in 1874 and described by historians as the first publicly funded statue of a woman in the United States, depicts her on the spot of the killings, holding a tomahawk in one hand and a clutch of scalps in the other.
For 19th-century New Englanders, Duston was held up as a symbol of frontier resilience. For modern Abenaki and other Indigenous communities, she is a reminder that the founding mythology of New England was built on, and frequently celebrated, violence done to their ancestors. That tension is what the statue keeps pulling to the surface every time a fresh round of paint goes up.
A Bill, a Committee, and a Different Path Forward
Last year, a New Hampshire lawmaker introduced legislation to remove the Duston statue altogether. That proposal ran into immediate complications, including pushback from some Abenaki First Nations leaders themselves. As NHPR previously reported, Abenaki representatives told lawmakers and reporters that the history should remain, but with additional context. The argument was that erasing the monument would also erase a teaching moment about how settler-colonial violence was once celebrated as heroism.
The original removal bill was eventually amended into a proposal to create a committee tasked with determining the future of the site, with an explicit goal of representing the Indigenous perspective. That committee approach effectively trades demolition for interpretation: the figure stays, but additional signage, plaques, or even a complementary monument representing the people Duston killed could be added to give visitors a fuller account.
Chief Killary told NHPR he supports adding context, including potentially a separate monument acknowledging Native perspectives on the original incident. “I think a great idea that was put up in the past was to put up a monument looking at things from the other side, like, what about the Natives whose land was being taken?” Killary said. “When you have multiple perspectives, when you can pull information from more than one source, then I think you’re truly educated.”
That interpretive approach is increasingly common nationally, where states and municipalities have wrestled with what to do about Confederate monuments, statues of colonial figures, and other commemorations that look very different in 2026 than they did in 1874. Adding context, rather than removing the object, allows communities to keep the historical artifact intact while changing the story it tells visitors.
The Practical Problem: Patrolling an Island
Even with a long-term interpretive plan in motion, the short-term policing problem is real. Boscawen police have tried to install trail cameras at the site to capture footage of vandals, with little success. There are few places to hide cameras on the small, low-lying island, and any visible camera quickly becomes a target itself.
“Vandalism to a statue in the middle of an island that no one could get to except by walking that doesn’t have any electricity on it… It’s pretty difficult to figure out who does it,” Killary said. “There’s no buildings there. It’s not near any buildings. It’s pretty easy to sneak on and sneak off in the dark without ever being seen.”
Killary said he expects monitoring and patrol activity to “increase dramatically” in the near term. The department is also continuing its investigation of the late April incident. Whether that produces a suspect remains to be seen, but the practical reality is that whoever is willing to walk a mile down a rail trail in the dark to spray paint a statue is unlikely to leave behind much evidence.
For state parks, that means the cleanup cycle keeps churning. For local taxpayers and Granite Staters who care about the site, it means more state employee hours and equipment burned on a problem that might have a political solution but does not yet have a policing one.
Why This Matters for New Hampshire
The Hannah Duston monument is not just a Boscawen issue. It sits at the intersection of three larger conversations the state has been having for years: how to honor New Hampshire’s colonial history without sanitizing it, how to share that history-telling with Abenaki communities whose ancestors are part of the story, and how the state pays for the upkeep of historic sites that draw both tourists and trouble.
Granite Staters who use the Northern Rail Trail know the Duston site as a quiet riverbend stop, often with interpretive panels, sometimes with fresh graffiti. People driving through Boscawen on Route 4 or Route 3 may not even realize the statue is there, tucked away on its little island. But every time spray paint goes up, the cost lands on the state’s parks budget and on a small police department in a town of roughly 4,000 people. Boscawen sits along the Merrimack corridor, the same broader region where lawmakers have recently been debating carbon sequestration restrictions on state and county lands.
The bigger picture decision, about what the site should ultimately look like, sits with the legislatively created committee and, by extension, with lawmakers in Concord. In the meantime, the monument keeps standing, the patrols keep increasing, and the cleanups keep happening. As other New Hampshire stories about historical commemoration have shown, decisions about who and what the state honors are increasingly bound up with how communities communicate across deep differences.
For now, Killary’s police department is back on the case. State parks crews are still working on getting the late April paint off the granite. And the Hannah Duston statue, controversial since the day it was unveiled in 1874, is still standing on its island, waiting for the next visitor, the next debate, and very possibly the next can of spray paint.
