DEERFIELD — Before the days of online banking, recording expenses on paper was the only way people kept track of their finances.
Dexter Marsh, the Greenfield man credited with discovering dinosaur footprints in the Pioneer Valley in the early 1800s, regularly spent money on insurance, cheese, beef, sugar and dried fish. We owe this knowledge to the discovery of one of his old ledgers recently purchased for the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association’s museum library. The ledger, which resembles a journal, details Marsh’s expenses from 1836 to 1838.
David Bosse, librarian for the association, said someone he knows mentioned to him the ledger was being sold on eBay and he used money from his budget to purchase it. He said he bought it from a book dealer in Westfield, but knows only the seller’s eBay username: “rozzinator!”
Bosse declined to give the ledger’s cost, but said it was in three figures. He said he paid for it on March 19 and it arrived four or five days later.
“I’m just glad it’s in an institution and didn’t just end up disappearing,” he said.
The ledger, roughly 4 inches by 6, is brown and has a soft leather cover. The first page appears stained with age, but all other pages are lighter in color.
Marsh lived on Bank Row in Greenfield in the 1800s. He is credited with discovering dinosaur tracks in the area’s stone.
Sarah Doyle works with Jurassic Roadshow, which conducts traveling fossil shows that bring the science, history and art of the valley’s dinosaur footprints to the public. She is also the content editor, researcher and writer for “Impressions Of A Lost World,” a website association hopes to launch next year as a National Endowment for the Humanities project about the footprint discoveries.
Doyle said the timing of the purchase couldn’t be better.
“It’s amazing it comes up now, right now that we’re writing about him,” she said.
Doyle said the Town of Greenfield hired Marsh for general repairs and projects and he also took odd jobs as a handyman for extra cash. Doyle said the ledger fills a gap in a collection of Marsh’s books now at the archives of Amherst College. She said Marsh clawed his way to the middle class through hard work, and the physical quality of his books improved over time, as he prospered more and more.
Doyle said Marsh kept careful records of his income and expenses, starting around 1830 and ending shortly before his death on April 2, 1853. She said the newly acquired ledger includes references to Marsh’s first wife’s lingering illness and death in May of 1838, leaving Dexter with a toddler and a 6-month-old son.
According to Doyle, Marsh was laying stone sidewalk in front of Franklin County’s first courthouse in March 1836, when he started noticing “bird tracks,” now identified as dinosaur footprints, in the slabs of stone he quarried in Gill.
Bosse said he will likely use a professional restorer in South Deerfield to resew the cover sometime soon, after it is digitally scanned.