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By Leslie Perrin Wilson, Curator, Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library  The short piece in the Freeman would likely have been the only public notice of this private tragedy had not author Nathaniel Hawthorne been one of those who searched for the body. When Martha Hunt committed suicide, Hawthorne was living at the Old Manse, his Concord residence from 1842 to 1845. As a Monument Street neighbor of the Hunt family (the Hunt house was located by Punkatasset Hill), Hawthorne was naturally expected to help look for the missing girl. He recorded his vivid impressions of the search in a lengthy July, 1845, journal entry, which reveals how powerfully Hawthorne was struck by the incident. He both reacted to it as a human being and responded to its innately literary elements. He not only presented an abundance of factual detail and sympathetic emotion in the account, but also developed motivation, mood, and atmosphere. He later drew heavily on this journal entry in describing the search for the body of the strong, passionate Zenobia in his Blithedale Romance (first published in 1852). Poet Ellery Channing came for Hawthorne at the Manse between 9:00 and 10:00 P.M. on July 9. The two set out by boat for the spot where Martha Hunt's personal effects had been discovered (not far from Flint's Bridge). Joshua Buttrick ("General Buttrick") and a younger man joined Channing and Hawthorne in the boat. Others remained on the bank. The party on the river probed the bottom with hooked poles and a hay-rake. The body was found in deep water, undisturbed by the river's current, and was towed back to land. Hawthorne described its condition in graphic detail, particularly the rigor mortis that had frozen the girl in her death throes and prevented her from being laid out in a natural position. He wrote of the construction of a makeshift bier and of the grim procession back to the Hunt farmhouse, where Mrs. Minot Pratt and others waited to undertake the difficult task of preparing the body for burial.
 What drove Martha Hunt to take her own life? By all accounts -- the piece in the Concord Freeman, Hawthorne's journal entry, and the biography by Allen French of Martha's brother, William Henry Hunt, published in 1940 in Memoirs of Members of the Social Circle in Concord (Fifth Series) -- she was an intelligent and sensitive young woman. Unfortunately, she was born into circumstances that did not encourage the full development and expression of her abilities. Hawthorne wrote that she was "a girl of education and refinement, but depressed and miserable for want of sympathy -- her family being an affectionate one, but uncultivated, and incapable of responding to her demands." Moreover, she appears to have been overwhelmed by the responsibility of teaching a class of some sixty pupils.Martha and William Henry Hunt were two of ten children raised by Daniel Hunt and his wife in the ancestral farmhouse (no longer standing) on Monument Street. Although descended from the first settlers of Concord and a man of self-discipline and integrity, Daniel Hunt had difficulty providing his large family with anything beyond the necessities of life. He farmed by old-fashioned methods, hampered by too few sons to bear the burden of physical labor and by too many daughters to feed, clothe, and educate. He did the best he could, but his children's opportunities for personal fulfillment and upward mobility were constrained. This was particularly difficult for Martha, who yearned for something better in life than teaching school, becoming a farmer's wife, or old maidhood within the confines of the family. It may well have troubled another Hunt daughter, who also drowned herself in the Concord River some time after Martha's suicide. Almost incredibly, a third sister died accidentally in the river.
The very different course of William Henry Hunt's life highlights the significance of gender in an individual's success in rising above difficult circumstances during the 19th century. Allen French commented at the beginning of his Social Circle biography of Hunt: "While it is generally true that no one can escape from his environment, that escape was as nearly as possible achieved by our old friend." By dint of intelligence, recognition of opportunity, hard work, and good luck, Hunt left behind the hardscrabble existence of his boyhood and lived to old age financially well-off and socially respected. (Through his civic generosity, the Town of Concord built the Hunt Gymnasium.) A poor young man, he married a somewhat older and distinctly more cultivated widow, traveled in Europe, and adopted new and innovative approaches to farming. Free to risk change and experimentation, he prospered. Martha Hunt, on the other hand, was a casualty of the more limited horizons and scope of action open to women. Such inequity was among the social realities exposed by feminist Margaret Fuller -- a model for Hawthorne's character Zenobia -- in her controversial and influential Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in the year of Hunt's suicide. At a much later time, Martha Hunt, too, might have harnessed her talents and seized her chances for advancement as successfully as her brother, might have thrived on facing and surmounting obstacles.
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A brief account of the "melancholy suicide" of Miss Martha E. Hunt appeared in the July 11, 1845 issue of the Concord Freeman. The nineteen year old daughter of Monument Street farmer Daniel Hunt, Martha was a teacher in Concord's district school system. She failed to show up in her classroom on July 9, 1845. Late in the day, a search party was formed. Ominously, her bonnet and shoes were found on the bank of the Concord River, her handkerchief in the shallow water. Her body was recovered from the river at about 11:00 P.M.