Here’s what you need to know about famed Maine midwife Martha Ballard
The Martha Ballard Memorial was unveiled Wednesday on the banks of the Kennebec River in Augusta's Mill Park, not far from where Ballard's home stood two centuries ago. (Joe Phelan/Staff Photographer)
AUGUSTA — A statue to honor famed 18th-century local midwife Martha Ballard was unveiled Wednesday at Mill Park in Augusta.
It’s less than 1,000 feet away from where she once lived on the Kennebec River in what was then Hallowell.
Ballard delivered more than 800 babies in her lifetime and kept a diary for 27 years. Her writing provides a valuable record of her life and work, as well as a first-person account of life in the late 1700s and early 1800s when few women in America were literate.
With the new memorial now standing tall in Mill Park, here are a few things to know about the life and legacy of Martha Ballard.
This undated file photo shows the diary of Martha Moore Ballard. (Contributed photo by Bruce Kennett)
HER DIARY WAS OVERLOOKED
Ballard’s diary eventually made it into the hands of her great-great-granddaughter Mary Hobart, one of the first female physicians in the United States. Hobart donated it to the Maine State Library in 1930.
However, the diary sat in relative obscurity for 50 years, with historians dismissing it as mundane and repetitive. That was until historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich found it and recognized the document’s wealth of knowledge and information.
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Ulrich published the biography, “A Midwife’s Tale” about Ballard’s life and diary, which won the Pulitizer Prize in 1991 and numerous other awards. PBS then produced a documentary for the “American Experience” series based on Ulrich’s book and the life and work of Ballard.
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Martha Ballard Memorial unveiled at Mill Park
Ballard’s diary was also adapted into a work of historical fiction in 2023 called “The Frozen River” by Ariel Lawhorn that has sold more than 2 million copies.
BALLARD CROSSED THE KENNEBEC
Ballard’s home was on Bond Brook off the Kennebec River. She often crossed the river in all conditions — at night, through ice and cold and amid flooding — to deliver care to those in need.
A sign near the new monument in Mill Park said the survival rate for babies in Ballard’s care was extraordinary for the time. She also never had a mother die in all her years of providing care to the community.
CLARA BARTON LINK
Clara Barton, a Civil War nurse who founded the American Red Cross in 1881, was a great-niece of Ballard.
Hobart, Ballard’s great-great-granddaughter, graduated from the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1884 and specialized in obstetrics.
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BALLARD, THE EXPERT WITNESS
Ballard attended some autopsies, and often gave testimony for unwed mothers in paternity cases, working to convince unmarried women to identify the fathers of their children; it was a common practice to obligate the fathers and not the local government to support the children.
She traveled to the courthouse in 1789 to give testimony in the trial of Judge Joseph North, who was accused of raping Rebecca Foster, the wife of the local minister. The judge was acquitted.
HERBS AND HOME REMEDIES
Ballard often used herbal remedies from plants in her garden to care for her patients.
Next to the new statue in Mill Park is a medicinal herb garden where plants Ballard mentioned in her diary are planted.
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Tagged: kennebec journal, Martha Ballard
Sara Coughlin covers the Augusta area for the Kennebec Journal. She received a degree in English and government with a concentration in creative writing from Bowdoin College, where she served as an editor. More by Sara Coughlin
