When researching the history of the discovery of the dinosaur tracks, the figure of Dexter Marsh hovered elusively  in the background. It wasn’t until I moved to western Massachusetts that I found a little more information at the town library, the Registry of Deeds, and the Amherst College archives. Marsh published no papers, but we can see his steady habits through his carefully kept records of income and expenses. He was literate but came from a family too poor to send him to school. Seemingly a humble man, he achieved a measure of fame and a modest fortune because he noticed what appeared to be the footprints of a bird in a slab of stone he quarried to lay for sidewalk.

Dexter Marsh. Photo of the original by Ed Gregory.

Born in 1806 in Montague, Massachusetts, Marsh moved to Greenfield in the early 1830s and built a little house on Clay Hill, now called Bank Row, near today’s Olive Street. He married Rebecca Slate from nearby Bernardston and started a family. He gained a reputation for industriousness, honesty, and conscientiousness as the handyman for the town gentry who hired him for repair work and help with their gardens and animals. He worked part-time as sexton at the Second Congregational Church and as a janitor at Town Hall.

While working for Town Hall in late winter of 1835, he noticed the “turkey tracks.” Although deeply religious, when Marsh showed the impressions to his neighbor, Dr. James Deane, he agreed with Deane that scientists, not theologians, should be notified. As we know now, the marks were later identified as the tracks of dinosaurs, but the word dinosaur had not even been coined yet, so scientific opinion agreed with Marsh and Deane that the prints had been left by amazingly large extinct birds.

Dexter may have been more baffled, maybe spooked, but also even more interested than we are today, because he didn’t have a ready-made answer to the questions the footmarks raised in his mind. In Marsh’s time, some still believed that fossils’ uncanny resemblance to living creatures was an illusion. Maybe they were God’s little joke or a test of faith: if you thought that fossils signified anything more—animals that have gone extinct, for example, like those mastodons that Thomas Jefferson so admired—your faith was weak. But Marsh could have read about the new science of geology in his local 4-page newspaper, where articles by Edward Hitchcock and Benjamin Silliman sometimes appeared.

He continued manual labor, but his fortunes improved. He collected more footprints, sometimes on slabs so big and heavy it’s a wonder he could move them. Eventually, he could sometimes hire others to work for him, often church brethren. Over the years, he donated specimens to museums, perhaps sold a few. He spent any extra money on geology books, religious publications, and abolitionist literature.

He built a “cabinet” (museum) onto his house and opened it to the public. The guest book still survives, preserving the signatures of over 3,000 visitors: neighbors, the wealthy families he’d worked for, well-known college professors, even foreigners. He was elected an honorary member to the Boston Society of Natural History (later the Boston Museum of Science), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. There were other collectors of fossil footprints—Deane and Hitchcock among them—but Marsh’s was acknowledged as the largest and finest. While Deane and Hitchcock argued publicly over credit for the initial discovery, Marsh never entered the fray, although one of his sons later said that his father felt he had not received the credit due him.

Marsh was only 47 years old when he died on April 2, 1853, leaving his second wife, Eunice, with five children, the youngest barely two months old. His illness came on suddenly and took him in a matter of weeks. He left a library of about 90 volumes, none of it easy reading: geology books by Hitchcock; Lyell’s Elements of Geology; Dana’s Manual of Mineralogy; Brooks’ Elements of Ornithology; 17 volumes on the Natural History of New York; issues of the Emancipator, and more.

Deane and Hitchcock assessed the value of the collection from his museum, to be sold at auction. The largest buyers were Amherst College, the Boston Society of Natural History, and Yale College. The proceeds allowed his family not great wealth, but at least some security. One son went to Harvard and became a mining engineer in Colorado; the other moved to Nebraska, possibly after also attending college. The daughters seem not to have married; one died young. A year after his death, Eunice noted in her diary that she “set a weeping willow on Dexter’s grave and some other plants, hope they will live and flourish.” No willow shades the grave now in the Federal Street Cemetery, where Dexter lies between Eunice and Rebecca and daughter Ella is nearby.

For a fuller biography of Dexter Marsh, see dinotracksdiscovery.org and Robert Herbert’s paper about Marsh’s museum on Bank Row in Greenfield, the first to look at the story in detail: http://tinyurl.com/ohrazqs