February is Black History Month, so we turn to two extraordinary Black women whose stories point to the important role Black people played in the shaping of Vermont. The episode begins with narrator explaining how Black stories have too often been under-appreciated. For instance, nobody knows Brattleboro's first black landowner, Benjamin Wheaton, an accomplished furniture maker and prominent person, bequeathed the West Brattleboro town common to the town. The host describes the remarkable Grafton storyteller Daisy Turner, whose story begins at 4:05. Narrator Jane Beck first met Daisy Turner when Daisy was 100 years old. Beck says Daisy 'spoke about the Civil War as if it were yesterday.' Beck was "astounded by the scope and significance' of Daisy's family's story from slavery, to Civil War, to freedom in Vermont and life in Grafton. We hear Daisy's vivid voice tell how her father -- Alec Turner - 'the strongest man in Grafton' carried a full flour barrel up the hill to their home "Journey's End' to win a bet. Beck helped found the Vermont Folklife Center and worked with the Windham Foundation to create the Turner Hill Interpretive Center around this work. Beck received a Peabody Award for an audio documentary about the Turner family as told by Daisy. The tape transitions at 9:15 to the mellifluous voice of narrator Desmond Peeples introducing the story of Lucy Terry Prince (1730 - 1821), a freed and learned African woman, whose legal arguments swayed the Vermont Republic's highest court. In 1764, Lucy and her husband Abijah, a free black couple, settled on 100 acres in Guilford as one of Guilford's first landowning settlers. There, they raised six children and defended their rights as landowners against the vicious efforts of certain racist neighbors. By the end of the 18th century, Guilford was the most popular town in Vermont and the Princes were one of its most prominent families. Lucy Terry Prince's only known surviving poem is called 'Bars Fight'. Lucy Terry Prince was about 20 years old and enslaved in Deerfield MA in 1746 when she witnessed an attack by indigenous people of the area on townspeople in Deerfield. The incident became known as the Bars Fight because it happened on the ‘bars’, a colonial term for meadow. She documented this historical incident in her poem, the oldest known work of literature by an African American. 'Bars Fight' survived in oral tradition about 100 years after her death, and appeared in print for the first time in 1854 on the front page of the Springfield Daily Republican. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, biographer of the Prince family, reads from her book 'Mr. and Mrs. Prince' about the attack on the Prince home. Multi-media artist and poet Shanta Lee shares some thoughts about Lucy and recites the poem "Bars Fight." The host ends the podcast by describing the Brattleboro Words Project's long effort with the town of Guilford to place a state historic marker honoring Lucy and the Prince family in 2021 at the Guilford Welcome Center (at Exit 1 on Interstate 91) and reads the actual text of of the marker. She also mentions that a joint Vermont State Legislature proclamation led by then State Representative Sara Coffey recognizing Lucy, the marker and the Princes.