Under a 19-foot-tall granite obelisk at the center of Arlington’s Old Burying Ground, off Pleasant Street, are the bodies of 12 locals killed during the first day of fighting of the American Revolution. On April 19, 1776, British troops retreating from the deadly battles of Lexington and Concord that morning desperately tried to make their way back to their quarters in Boston–passing though Arlington, then known as a farming community called Menotomy.
“Jason Russell was barbarously murdered in his own house by Gage’s bloody troops,” according to the inscription carved on his headstone in the cemetery. “His body is quietly resting in this grave with Eleven of our friends, who in like manner, with many others, were cruelly slain, on that fatal day. Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.”
Originally buried in a mass grave, Russell and the other patriots were dug up in 1848 and placed in a stone vault under the obelisk. “Many of the British dead from that day were buried in an unmarked grave near the wall in the spot used for the burial of slaves,” according to the Arlington Historical Society.
Sculptor Christopher Frost evokes this history in “A Remembrance of Menotomy’s Everyday Defenders, 1775,” 2025, two groupings of cast-concrete pedestals outside the neighboring Robbins Memorial Library. The Somerville artist has left the pedestals vacant, but they imply bronze monuments that would stand atop them–and their absence feels something like ghosts.
Frost’s subject is how the Revolution transformed people’s roles. He has labeled one pedestal “teacher” on the side, but “insurgent” on top. A “carpenter” becomes “instigator.” A “midwife” turns into a “revolutionist.” A “miller” becomes a “rebel.”
The temporary art installation, on view until July 4, 2026, was created as part of “Unseen/Unforgotten,” commissioned by ArtsArlington and curated by Cecily Miller as part of Arlington’s commemoration of the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution.
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