Hannah Shenkle
The Resurrection of a Marionette: hand-crafted by Katdazzle
The Original Porcelain 8” marionette
Future Hand-carved large 15” marionette
Born porcelain. Reborn in wood. Catherine’s mean spirit grew too large for her first body.
The True Story of Catherine Stubblebine. She Didn’t Believe in Free Love , She Believed in Consequences.
The Woman Who Saved Her Son and Sank Her Husband
Catherine Bachman Stubblebine had never imagined her life would become a courtroom spectacle. She had expected a normal marriage — church on Sundays, a house full of children, a husband who built things and kept his word.
Instead, she married David Stubblebine: charming hands, restless mind, and a weakness for the kind of religious excitement that could swallow a family whole.
By the early 1840s, David and his brothers drifted into the orbit of Theophilus Gates and the so-called Battle Axes of the Lord. Communal property. Free love. Discarding your wife “because the Spirit said so.” Catherine was appalled; David was enchanted.
It should have been four strikes. But only three men went down. Because Catherine — abandoned, humiliated, and surrounded by the steady Bachman clan — walked into West Chester armed with something no man in Free Love Valley had: leverage.
When David publicly abandoned her for Hannah Williamson, Catherine scooped up her children and moved to Coventry Woods. She didn’t break. She didn’t beg. She didn’t lose her footing.
But her sons? That was trickier.
Jacob, bright, impulsive, and too easily dazzled by his father, followed David straight into Battle Axe nonsense. When the arrests came in 1842–43, the Stubblebine men fell in a neat row:
- David — adultery
- Daniel — adultery
- William — adultery
- Jacob — fornication
Her relatives were tied in with the courthouse lawyers. She knew exactly which doors to knock on, which ears to whisper into, and which legal strings to tug. When the trials began, the courthouse overflowed with farmers hungry for scandal. Sleigh bells jingled in the streets. Strangers leaned over railings to hear every sordid detail.
Catherine sat straight-backed among them. And when she took the stand, her voice was steady — no theatrics, no weeping, just clean testimony.
Her husband’s fate was sealed. Convicted on six counts. Eighteen months in jail — the longest sentence of any Battle Axe. But Jacob? Her boy walked out of that courtroom “not guilty,” his future intact.
Not because he was innocent. But because Catherine would not lose a son the way she lost a husband.
After the conviction, the state seized David’s property “for the support of his discarded wife.” When the deed passed into her hands, Catherine sold it immediately — straight to Constable Billy Rader. It wasn’t spite; it was survival.
She rebuilt her life alongside her children, especially John, and together they later worked quietly with the Underground Railroad — a life of justice, not chaos.
When Catherine died in 1863, her gravestone named her still as “Wife of David Stubblebine.”But everyone in Chester County knew better: David may have been the Battle Axe, but Catherine was the one who could swing a blade.
Meet Denise – The Voice Actress Behind Catherine Stubblebine
Meet Denise, the talented voice behind Catherine, the kick-ass wife of David. Denise was my first puppeteer. But sadly she moved to Vermont.
