The Midwife of the Frozen Crossing — Martha Ballard

A lantern swings in one hand. A midwife’s bag hangs from the other. The river is frozen over and she is crossing it on foot, in the dark, because a woman in Hallowell, Maine, cannot wait for morning.

It is 1790.

She does not just attend births. She compounds the medicines, lays out the dead, and testifies in court when the moment requires it, and she writes down what happened at the end of every single day.

She does not just write. She persists. For twenty-seven years, in mud and ice and summer heat, in illness and grief, she makes the entry. Some days it is one sentence. Some days it is three. The record does not break.

She does not just keep a diary. She preserves the lives of 816 people. Between 1785 and 1812, she delivers every one of them, with maternal and infant mortality rates that the male physicians entering her territory cannot match.

Her Spark of Liberty was the ledger. The plain, disciplined act of writing down, at the end of every day, what happened, because the work deserved a record and no one else was going to make one.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

She was born in Oxford, Massachusetts, on February 9, 1735. She moved to Hallowell, Maine, at forty-two and went to work. She delivered 816 babies over twenty-seven years, made 9,965 diary entries, and wrote her last one on May 7, 1812. She died two days later. The diary sat in private hands for generations until historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich found it and built a Pulitzer Prize-winning book from it. The diary is fully digitized and available to anyone who wants to read it. Every entry is true.

Her name was Martha Ballard.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

The Speedwell’s Confession, Book One of the Sparks of Liberty series, is live on Amazon Kindle and free with Kindle Unlimited. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GZ5QH7L8

www.NowWeKnowEm.com

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