An Execution In the Rain

Joshua Hempstead, in his diary entry for November 21, 1753, notes that “it Rained moderately for most of the day.” It was raining moderately, too, when I went to see the place where Hempstead was that day, on Gallows Lane. He had come to see a hanging. The "Cross Highway" off the road to Norwich through what is now Waterford was over two miles from where Hempstead lived; he “rid” there. Many other people came from much farther - Frances Manwaring Caulkins, in her History of New London, Connecticut, estimates up to 30 miles. There were ten thousand spectators, Hempstead reported, “of all sexes & nations.”

The eponymous gallows had been set up to execute Sarah Bramble, for the crime of “the Murdering of her Bastard Child.” It had happened in March of the previous year. Bramble had given birth to the girl and hidden her body for four days. Then, when alone in the house, she burned the body, finally hiding it in a box in a “secret place.” This information was gathered by Hempstead and others at what he calls an “Inquisition.”

She was presumably a servant - she lived in the house of Bryan Palmes - but other than being young and white and having committed infanticide, she is a blank. Hempstead recorded practically every raindrop that fell and every local ship that sailed away, but gossip, aside from its most basic outlines, was not his concern. Who the father of her child was, the circumstances of her pregnancy, whether she gave any reason for killing her baby, or what the evidence is that she killed it at all, are not known. We do know she was executed at 3:00 pm, on what Caulkins described as the “highest part of the road.” “It is a rugged, wild and dreary road, even at the present day,” she wrote, in 1895.

It was dreary when I drove up it too, and I could imagine it being rugged, though its wildness has been tamed. Now it cuts through the Connecticut College Arboretum. Wire fences separate the road from the trees. No one else was out driving on that wet morning except campus security. The rain fell into a little body of water, a stream or pond, that looked steely and cold. I couldn't tell exactly where the highest hill was, but I knew it must be near Bolles Lane, because Joshua Hempstead mentions the place being “above Jno Bolles.”

The story is dreadful whatever the truth of it is, no matter if Sarah Bramble was insane or evil or misunderstood or forced into her awful deed by another. Perhaps it was too distasteful even for the local citizens who decided on the guilty verdict and turned out to watch the punishment, because it was never done again. Bramble’s was the only public execution of any white person in New London. But apparently no one had a problem with the road name. I imagine it was at first just a fact, then either a warning or an approval or a remembrance, and eventually simply a name, divorced from its original meaning, or a relic of Old New England, an odd selling point almost, like a haunted house.

It was that transition, not the hanging itself, that I thought about as I drove up and down the hills of Gallows Lane. Through every stage of development this area went through, every house built, every street sign approved and council meeting held, no one ever wanted (or no one ever wanted badly enough) to erase this less than happy episode of local history. I drove the length of the road several times, thinking that this was a little morbid. But I would never want to change it either. I quite like living in a place that does not forget the darkness of its early years, but lets it run like a jogging trail through the Arboretum woods, ensuring that along with prominent people and geographical features, the memory of tragedy also has its place.