North America's earliest enduring tradition of indigenous balladry emerged out of the highly literate folk culture that flourished in New England, and elsewhere in the Northeast, during the second half of the eighteenth century. This essay examines the process by which topical poems inspired by local tragedies--including some of America's earliest homegrown ballads--were composed, transmitted, and preserved in print and manuscript form, focusing on a small but exemplary group of old tragedy verses that a Connecticut farmer's daughter wrote into her copybook during the 1820s and 1830s. More broadly, Martha Buck's copybook challenges the conventional understanding of folk ballads as quintessential products of 'oral culture' and the related view of the South as the natural seedbed of early American balladry.