Charity Lamb

Charity Lamb (c.1818 – 1879) was an American domestic violence survivor who was the first woman convicted of murder in Oregon Territory. She had traveled west from North Carolina via the Oregon Trail, before settling near Oregon City with her husband and six children. On May 13, 1854, Lamb mortally wounded her husband by striking him twice in the back of the head with an axe. Rumors, and information presented by the prosecution at trial, implicated involvement with a paramour, by Charity and possibly her teenage daughter, herself acquitted of the murder two months prior. The defense argued that her husband had a long history of domestic violence, and the murder was committed in self-defense, or out of a level of fear that rose to insanity, marking her trial as an early example of the abuse defense.

She was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor at the Oregon State Penitentiary. In 1862, she was transferred to Oregon Hospital for the Insane. She died there in 1879, and is likely buried on a corner of the property.