In 1854, Charity Lamb struck her abusive husband with an axe near Oregon City. She became the first woman convicted of murder in Oregon Territory.

At sentencing, she told the court: I knew he was going to kill me. The judge replied: The jury thinks you ought to have gone away. She explained, clearly and precisely, why she couldn't. She was convicted anyway.

Eight years later, she was transferred to the Oregon Hospital for the Insane — not because she was insane, but because the governor needed to be able to say Oregon had no female prisoners. She died there in 1879. She is likely buried at Lone Fir Cemetery, in a section paved over around 1930. Her name did not appear in the cemetery records.

This episode is about Charity Lamb. It is also about what Oregon built for the women and the poor and the inconvenient long before she arrived — and kept building long after she was gone.

Lone Fir Cemetery and its unmarked asylum section. The 3,500 copper canisters at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, corroding in a building for decades, now ceramic urns on a memorial wall waiting to be claimed. The potter's field near Warrenton, where bones were used as railroad fill in 1917. Washington Park — the Oregon Zoo, the Japanese Garden, the Rose Garden — built on the ground of the Multnomah County Poor Farm, where they keep finding remains every time they break ground for a new exhibit. Dammasch State Hospital in Wilsonville, where a subdivision now stands with no marker.

Oregon has been building underworlds for its inconvenient people since before it was a state. It names the streets after the men who built the institutions. It paves over the graves. It builds something beloved on top and forgets what's underneath.

Her name did not appear in the records. It appears here.

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Content note: This episode discusses domestic violence and abuse, murder, wrongful imprisonment, forced institutionalization, desecration of graves, and the erasure of marginalized people from the historical record. Charity almost certainly did kill her husband. The episode does not require her to be innocent to witness what was done to her.

As always — take what you need. Leave the rest.

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Sources include: Ronald B. Lansing, "The Tragedy of Charity Lamb," Oregon Historical Quarterly (2000); Diane Goeres-Gardner, Inside Oregon State Hospital; Oregon State Hospital Museum (oshmuseum.org); Oregon Metro / Lone Fir Cemetery; David Maisel, Library of Dust; Clatsop County Historical Society Quarterly (1982).

Breath & Bone is written and narrated by Martina Rutledge.

Find us on YouTube: @betweenbreathandbone

martinarutledge.com