Black Heritage Trail signs receive final Select Board approval
The board gave its green light for nine historical signs after months of planning and a summer of heated debate.
It’s settled: Black Heritage Trail Markers are coming to Acton.
The Select Board gave its green light for nine historical signs on August 31 after months of planning and a summer of heated debate. The markers could be installed this fall.
“I’m so glad we got to this point,” Select Board member Paul Boehm said moments before the board’s decision. “It’s been a tough road.”
Economic Vitality Manager Mimi Graney first brought the marker proposal to the Select Board in December 2025. Signs will denote significant people and places from Acton’s past, including a Acton Center house where Harriet Tubman once slept.
Historic District Commission members, who regulate several marker locations, worried that big signs would seem out of place in the town center.
Project backers said markers should be big enough to honor previously underrepresented stories.
The sides reached an agreement in July after weeks of negotiations. The signs will be 16 inches wide by 53.3 inches tall.
The town is funding the marker project with a $14,000 state grant and $14,000 from the federal American Rescue Plan Act.
The HDC approved installations for three years.
In addition to the Tubman sign at a private home on Main Street, the list of now-approved markers includes several others in Acton Center.
- One sign will recall the life of John Garrison Jr., who maintained municipal buildings as superintendent of the Town House, according to a mockup.
- Another will stand outside the Corinthian Masonic Lodge, where activist Ellen Garrison and her brother John attended school.
- A marker will recall Trinitarian Congregational Church’s historic commitment to “antislavery activism.”
- Another will describe how Shadrach Minkins found refuge in a Sudbury Road home after being rescued from federal custody under the Fugitive Slave Act in Boston.
- Others will mark places where Black Concordians owned homes in the 18th and 19th centuries.
One sign recalling a speech Frederick Douglass gave in town got Select Board approval but is pending final HDC signoff after organizers agreed to move it from outside Holy Family Parish to nearby Wright Tavern.
Historical Commission member Nancy Fresella-Lee advocated further review of the markers’ content. She appealed to the Select Board by email earlier on August 31 to “briefly postpone their decision,” according to the board’s correspondence packet.
She said she was writing on her own behalf. The meeting proceeded as planned.
Deliberation reflection
Frustration abounded on the path to Select Board approval.
Former commissioner Dennis Fiori emailed town leaders after the HDC vote that his ex-colleagues had been “treated in a disgusting manner.”
Others slammed HDC over the trail marker fight and a recent unrelated court ruling during the August 31 Select Board meeting.
“The commission remains focused on the size of things — not the context or substance of the issue at hand,” resident Andrea Solomon said.
Solomon, who chairs the Public Works Commission but spoke on her own behalf, said she thinks Acton would have been fine with slightly larger markers that organizers first promoted. She suggested it could be worth revisiting the HDC’s framework, “which currently favors the status quo.”
“The community as a whole would have been better off for not having inflicted the pain of these insensitive and oddly focused deliberations on our Black friends and neighbors,” she said.
Cemetery review
Project supporters applauded and exchanged smiles and quiet congratulations after the Select Board vote. They hope to install approved markers by October 12 — the 185th anniversary of Douglass’ first Acton speech.
It’s “exciting and timely” to launch the installation in sync with the milestone, project co-lead Joe Palumbo told The Acton Bridge.
The Cemetery Committee hadn’t met since early June but was scheduled to take up two remaining proposals for signs at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and Old Hill Burying Ground on September 2. The Select Board approval didn’t include those sites because they were still pending review.
“Multiple [Cemetery Committee] meetings are anticipated before final approval,” Graney wrote in a memo to the Select Board.
