Boston Needed a Founding Father for Its 250th Anniversary Mural. It Got a 16-Year-Old Girl Historians Can't Confirm Existed.

July 5, 2026

A city commissions a mural for the country's 250th anniversary. It expects a flag, a founding father, maybe a horse and a lantern. Boston got a horse and a rider, but the rider is a 16-year-old girl historians can't fully prove ever existed.

An open call built for a big anniversary

The Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy controls one of the most visible public art walls in downtown Boston, the Dewey Square mural site thousands of commuters pass every day. For the 2026 edition, tied to the United States' semiquincentennial, the Conservancy ran its first-ever national open call, inviting artists everywhere to pitch work that spoke to the anniversary. WBUR reported in February that the commission went to Rixy, a Boston-based muralist known for large-scale work rooted in Latinx Caribbean identity and community activism.

Rixy titled the piece "The Midnight Ride." The obvious reference is Paul Revere, the rider Boston has built a statue, a public mall, and a chunk of the grade-school curriculum around. Rixy didn't paint him.

The rider Boston skipped in class

Instead the mural puts Sybil Ludington at the center. Ludington was a teenager who, according to the story passed down for generations, rode through a driving rainstorm on April 26, 1777, to rally militia after a messenger arrived soaked through and warned that British troops were burning Danbury, Connecticut. History.com reports she was 16 years old and covered roughly 40 miles that night, more than double the distance of Paul Revere's ride, ranging as far as Mahopac and Stormville before making it home, and unlike Revere she was never captured.

In Rixy's mural the figure isn't a literal portrait of one specific teenager. The Bay State Banner described her as a brown-skinned, warrior-like woman wearing a Lady Liberty-style crown and gown, meant to stand in for the activists history tends to leave out of the textbook version: women, younger people, Black and brown organizers who did the work without getting the statue.

the statue of Sybil Ludington on her horse in Carmel, New York. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

A ride historians can't confirm happened

Here's the complication nobody smoothed over before the paint went up. Sybil Ludington's ride has no contemporary paper trail. Smithsonian Magazine reported that a 2015 study published in The New England Quarterly found no official military records or eyewitness accounts backing the story, and that Ludington's own surviving letters never once mention it. The tale entered popular history decades after the war, largely through local historians and later a mid-20th-century statue campaign in Putnam County, New York, not through any document Ludington or her contemporaries left behind.

So Boston's anniversary mural, built to mark 250 years of a documented founding, leans on a founding story nobody can fully document. The city painted the myth anyway, 76 feet tall, on a wall thousands of people walk past every day.

the Paul Revere equestrian statue in Boston's North End. Image: cdn.britannica.com.

Painted by hand, forty feet up, over four weeks

None of this happened by wheeling out a printed vinyl banner. Rixy and two collaborators, Ayanna Mack and Sagie Vangelina, spent most of May on a boom lift, spray-painting the wall panel by panel. WBUR's follow-up coverage put the work at roughly four weeks, starting May 1 and wrapping June 5, with pedestrians watching the piece grow in from the street the entire time.

Rixy was born in Roxbury and partly raised in Las Vegas, and has spent the last decade moving from sketchpads to building-sized walls, developing a signature fictional world she calls Cúcala that recurs across her murals. Dewey Square is the biggest platform she's had, and the Conservancy says the piece will stay up for 10 to 11 months, meaning it will outlast most gallery shows currently on view in Boston and most of this year's news cycle.

A wall built to outlast the argument

Whether Sybil Ludington's ride happened exactly as told is beside the point Rixy is making. She didn't paint a confirmed historical event. She painted the fact that Boston's official 250th-anniversary story had room for exactly one horse and one rider, and used the city's highest-visibility mural wall to argue it should have had at least two.