The Kennebunkport Historical Society collection is full of intriguing treasures; each with a story of its own. One such treasure that I am drawn to is a finely sculpted two-foot fragment of a green marble statue mounted and labeled with reverence.

Boston Author, Margaret Deland, summered at a cottage near the Nonantum Resort she had purchased from architect Henry Paston Clark in 1890. After her husband Lorin passed in 1917, Margaret began extending her annual visits to Kennebunkport long into the chilly autumn. In 1923 she purchased the winterized Marcellus Cluff House across Ocean Ave from her cottage Greywood.

During the summer of 1924, Mrs. Deland and her gardener, Ben Hoff, were assessing the gardening potential at the Cluff House. While examining an ancient stone wall behind the house Margaret noticed what looked like the tiny face looking up at her from between two stones buried deep in the dirt at the base of the wall. Ben dug out the rocks to uncover pieces of Adriatic coral and a green marble semi-naked crouching figure of a man wearing a cape over his shoulder. Though the figure was missing his nose and part of his limbs, Margaret dubbed the curiosity, Little Green Man. For thirteen years, she could learn nothing about the sculpture, but she proudly displayed him on a pedestal in her famous garden at Greywood.

Dr. Gertrude Randolph Richards, an expert in Florentine merchants in the age of the Medici, came to lunch at Greywood in 1937. She took one look at the Little Green Man and recognized him as a copy of the statue of L’Arrotino she had seen in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence Italy. L’Arrotino was a mythical Scythian slave, who was ordered by Apollo, the Roman God of music and poetry, to flay a competitive flute player named Marsyas who had embarrassed him. Like Margaret’s Little Green Man, the sculpture in Florence of the crouching L’Arrotino sharpening his knife on a stone wears a cape over one shoulder and his forehead is marked with deep frown lines.

After Margaret Deland’s death The Little Green Man was donated to the Kennebunkport Historical Society. The coral found with the Little Green Man leads us to think that it might have arrived in Kennebunkport as ballast on a ship.