This is a sidewalk mural I just completed in Greenfield, near the parking garage on Bank Row. It's one of 12 murals painted by myself and other artists as part of the Greenfield Abolitionist trail. The story depicts Dexter and Eunice Marsh.

In 1953, a woman named Sophia Woodman sent the Historical Society of Greenfield her recollections of a story told her as a child by her surrogate “aunt” Arabella Marsh. Born in Greenfield in 1835, Arabella Marsh grew up on Clay Hill (on the site of present-day #39 Bank Row). Her father Dexter, a laborer who discovered fossilized dinosaur tracks while laying a sidewalk and eventually attained local renown for his extensive fossil collection, was the son of Joshua Marsh, a Montague man once described by a contemporary as an “abolitionist to the core.”

According to Woodman, a very young Arabella Marsh came home one day to find the yard full of black children, with whom she played delightedly until nightfall. Unable to locate them the following morning, she went crying to her stepmother, who asked, “What black children, dearie? There are no black children; you must have had a very interesting dream. Now run along to school and don’t talk about it.” Only as she grew older did Marsh begin to suspect that her parents sheltered fugitive

slaves.