Two Deaths, One Date: Patience Boston & the Purrinton Family | York & Augusta, Maine

On July 9, 1734, a Native woman named Patience Boston confessed to drowning an eight-year-old boy in a well — then walked two miles to turn herself in. Seventy-two years later, to the day, a respected Maine farmer spent an evening sharpening an axe and reading his Bible by candlelight before murdering nearly his entire family.

Two tragedies. Same calendar date. Both set in colonial Maine, centuries ago.

Two documents, centuries-old that survive only because someone who knew the people involved decided to write down what happened — a pair of Puritan ministers shaping one woman's last words into a lesson for their congregation; a midwife, recording only what she witnessed, with no agenda at all, though her heartbreak is apparent.

This episode pairs both cases – set in York and Augusta, Maine – tracing the unlikely survival of their stories throughout history, and asking who gets to tell the story of the dead, and why it matters.

This episode exists because July 9 is our cohost Cassie's birthday — and when that date flagged two colonial Maine tragedies separated by exactly seventy-two years, it felt like too strange a pairing to pass up. I had no idea quite how dark it would get when I picked up the mantle of telling these stories – sorry, Cassie.

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