DEERFIELD RIVER ARCHIVE
Title: Dear Andrew Baker: My First Town MeetingDate: May 2026 · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts
Author: John F. Sendelbach
I. The Town Meeting Moment
Last Tuesday night I attended my first town meeting in twenty years of living and working in Shelburne Falls. I was five days short of sixty, and something about that round number had finally pushed me through the door of Memorial Hall.
Two hundred people filled the old theater. We were there to deliberate, with the solemn gravity usually reserved for constitutional conventions, over a thirty-five-dollar line item. The absurdity was not lost on anyone. Then Andrew Baker took the floor.
As Select Board member, he offered a short tribute — thirty seconds of genuine eloquence — to the man who had donated the land on which Memorial Hall now stands. The room applauded. Warmly. Unanimously. Except me.
The crowd applauded. I sat there thinking: Wait. Who gave him the land? And before that, who gave it to them?
That unasked question hung in the applause like smoke after a match has been struck. The ritual had done its work. We had performed gratitude for a clean, comfortable chapter of local history, and the deeper ledger beneath the floorboards remained closed.
II. Memorial Hall & The Layered History of the Land
Memorial Hall was built in 1897 on land offered by the veterans of the Ozro Miller Post of the Grand Army of the Republic. They attached conditions: space for veterans’ meetings and a theater for the arts. The result is the rare hybrid we sat in that night — town hall and 425-seat theater — a genuinely wonderful building.
But history does not begin where their deed begins.
For thousands of years before any English deed was written, this valley belonged to the Pocumtuck people. They maintained trails, seasonal villages, fishing sites, and planting grounds across the Deerfield watershed. Their relationship to the land was one of stewardship and cyclical use.
Colonial deeds reinterpreted shared access as permanent ownership. Fences went up. Access was blocked. The 1869 Massachusetts Enfranchisement Act dissolved tribal status and communal holdings, turning “surplus” lands into private lots and town centers. Municipal buildings like Memorial Hall were often placed on former Indigenous hubs. The naming celebrated post-1897 stories while the 10,000-year continuum was erased or relegated to “prehistory.”
The applause that night was for one chapter. The longer ledger went unacknowledged.
III. The Selective Applause & Performative Inclusion
There were roughly two hundred people in the room. As best I could tell, only two were Black.
When those two residents stood to speak, the room broke protocol to applaud — warm, sustained clapping. When white speakers finished, the room was largely silent, as Robert’s Rules expects. The contrast was impossible to miss.
In an overwhelmingly white space, the applause seemed well-intentioned: a signal that “we see you, you belong here.” Yet the same hands that applauded the Black residents also applauded, warmly and unanimously, Andrew Baker’s tribute to the Civil War veterans’ land donation. Performative inclusion and celebration of the founding myth sat side by side in the same evening.
These are not opposites. They are two faces of the same historical coin.
IV. The Writer’s Position & Legacy on the Bridge of Flowers
I am a sculptor and landscape designer, Cornell-trained, who has lived and worked in Shelburne Falls for more than twenty years. Three of my permanent installations remain on the Bridge of Flowers: the welded steel trolley gate, the river bench, and the Pothole Fountain.
During installation of the fountain, my collaborator Paul Forth — a gifted stonemason married to a Black woman with two mixed-race daughters — encountered a technical gap between massive slabs. That gap was shaped exactly like the continent of Africa. Paul selected and polished black glacial stones, fitted them skillfully so they sat flat and seamless, and asked if I approved. I said hell yes.
We did not announce it. We did not virtue-signal. We simply did the work. Those black stones are now permanently embedded in the foundation of the town’s most beloved landmark — a quiet, structural acknowledgment of Black presence and worth, installed years before 2020. They sit three feet from the anti-racism plaque the committee later installed in response to the campaign that called me a racist. The accusation and the refutation, side by side in concrete.
The Bridge of Flowers was created in 1929 by the Shelburne Falls Women’s Club. In that same period, the Ku Klux Klan floated a burning cross down the Deerfield River directly beneath the new garden, with crosses burning on both hillsides. The trolleys that once crossed the bridge carried “Black to the back” signs. The garden was built on top of that history, not instead of it.
V. The 2020 Iron Bridge Incident & Cancellation
In June 2020 I walked to the Iron Bridge to document an unauthorized closure affecting local businesses. I was immediately surrounded, pressed against the railing, and confronted aggressively. A young woman filmed only my reaction and posted a clip that reached over twenty-two thousand views, labeling me a racist and disruptor. A petition to remove my work gathered roughly six hundred signatures. The Bridge of Flowers Committee held secret meetings. The Greenfield Recorder ran front-page stories without contacting me.
I lost thirty pounds in ten days. My business and reputation took a severe hit. What began as a distorted video became a six-year institutional operation.
All of this happened while the black stones I had helped embed years earlier sat quietly in the fountain the committee apparently never truly saw.
VI. Police Department Pattern & Institutional Failure
The social campaign became institutional. Katherine Hennessey filed plentiful police reports against me between 2020 and 2023. I was never contacted or interviewed. In July 2021 Sergeant Kurt Gilmore wrote in an official report (21BUC-54-OF): “I told Hennessey that I was not going to call Sendelbach because it hasn’t worked in the past.” That sentence — the Permission Structure — became departmental policy for years.
Every report collapsed when evidence was reviewed. Judges found no probable cause; one petition was denied with prejudice. No perjury referrals were issued. Detective Tucker Jenkins co-signed the 2023 criminal charge without ever meeting me.
On September 6, 2024 Hennessey warned my landlord that “it’s really only a matter of time before someone gets hurt.” The letter reached Detective Jenkins. No action was taken. On November 30, 2025 the prediction was fulfilled in front of Floodwater Brewing. The department’s investigation showed significant shortcomings. A stay-away order was later imposed at arraignment.
VII. Additional Sideshows Showing Cop Behavior
The pattern appeared in separate incidents as well.
In spring 2024 an aggressive driver committed road rage against me. Officer Christopher Pettingill responded, agreed the behavior was aggressive, and noted expired registration and inspection. Yet he ultimately released the driver with leniency and filed a report framing me as the aggressor. This is the same officer who co-signed the 2023 charge against me without meeting me.
On August 10, 2024, during the Bridge of Flowers Classic on tax-free weekend, Chief Gregory Bardwell threatened me with arrest for disorderly conduct while I sought redress on a public road. Simultaneously Sergeant Kurt Gilmore physically blocked my camera from filming a volunteer, then shook the volunteer’s hand. Two clear First Amendment violations occurred in parallel, on camera.
These cases, though separate, illustrate the same selective enforcement.
VIII. Town Meeting Observations & Economic/Civic Hypocrisy
That same evening revealed current priorities. Speakers celebrated rising property values and “wealth growth.” Farmland was discussed for conversion into fourteen new lots to strengthen the tax base. What went unspoken was the pricing-out of working residents, artists, and small businesses.
A $10,000 appropriation for the local food pantry serving 120 families drew debate, with several well-fed residents arguing against it. The woman running the pantry noted families depend on it to eat. The contrast was stark.
The plastic pavilion project on rented private land — roughly $25,000 in town money — added to the picture of short-term decisions and shifting liability.
Throughout, I thought of the documented warnings I had sent the Select Board over three years. They received no replies. Yet Andrew Baker had time to lecture me on civility and social media. The selective engagement was telling.
IX. Personal Collaborations as Counter-Evidence
I have spent decades working side-by-side with people very different from myself.Paul Forth began as an employee, then became a collaborator on the Sojourner Truth monument and the Africa stones in the Pothole Fountain. Mohammed Yaseen, a Palestinian refugee from Gaza via Jordan, spent a week in my studio fabricating metal pieces for his shop. These are not performative gestures. They are the ordinary record of how I have lived and worked here.
They stand in direct contradiction to the “racist” label fastened to me in 2020.
X. The Repair Vision: Pocumtuck State Park
From inside the wreckage, I have been designing something larger.
Pocumtuck State Park is a reparative landscape project for the Deerfield River corridor. It would restore salmon passage and the annual nitrogen cycle that once fed the watershed. It would honor the sixty Black residents displaced by the trolley expansion with sixty polished black stones in a stainless steel geodesic lattice. A ghost-frame trolley trestle planted with native vines would let memory remain visible while nature reclaims it. Sculptural nodes would mark Indigenous sites and ecological thresholds.
This is not another plaque. It is a living system — biological, historical, and cultural repair at watershed scale. It asks the town to address what was actually taken rather than gesture toward what was lost.
XI. Closing & Call to Andrew Baker
I am not writing this as a personal indictment of you, Andrew. You strike me as a knowledgeable public servant who cares about this town. The tribute you gave that night was an ordinary civic gesture. That is precisely why it matters. The mechanism of selective memory needs no malice — only the repeated choice to stop asking questions when the applause feels comfortable.
I came to my first town meeting at nearly sixty because I live here, I intend to keep living here, and I intend to keep building things that last. I have skin in this valley — literally embedded in its most famous landmark. I have collaborated across lines of race and background as daily practice. And I have watched how quickly a community can turn on one of its own when the preferred narrative is challenged.
The archive is open. No login. No fee. The full record lives at johnsendelbach.com. I would be glad to discuss any part of it, including the Pocumtuck State Park proposal, in whatever forum you or the Select Board consider appropriate.
I will keep asking the questions that thirty-five-dollar votes and forty-five-second tributes do not make room for. That is not a threat. It is a citizen exercising the right the Grand Army veterans fought to preserve.
The black stones are still in the fountain. The river is still running. The record is not in the water. It is here, open, and waiting.
With respect for the office you hold and the longer view of the land beneath it,
John F. Sendelbach
Sculptor · Landscape Designer · Legacy Artist, Bridge of Flowers
Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026