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#CesarCT94

Game Changer: Witness Stones Project

WSP · Dec 21, 2022 ·

United Methodist Church, Danbury, Witness Stones installation. Photo: Dennis Culliton.

By Dennis Culliton in Connecticut Explored, Winter 2022-23 Issue

When I was a child growing up in southern Massachusetts I was fascinated by New England history and curious about the colonial and early American houses that surrounded me. I would close my eyes and try to imagine the lives of the people who lived in them. I could conjure up the Puritans and the early English, Scottish, and Irish immigrants. Sometimes I would try to imagine the lives of the Nipmuc people who preceded them on the land. But I was never taught about, nor did I ever imagine, the enslaved men and women whose lives were just as inextricably woven into New England history and the history of my hometown.

When I became an eighth-grade U.S. history teacher in Guilford, I brought my love of local history. If you’ve ever been to Guilford you know that it looks like a Norman Rockwell painting. An austere white Congregationalist church has pride of place in the center of town. Its 16-acre green is ringed by four churches, the town hall, a family-owned hardware store, and a local market. The neighboring streets are lined with carefully-preserved 18th- and 19th-century houses. Guilford is what nostalgic New England looks like in our mind’s eye.

As a teacher, I began to understand that the lives and stories that had been missing from my own early education were still missing from my students’. How could my students understand the early history of their country if I couldn’t help them create a fuller picture? That history must include the reality of slavery in New England and must chronicle the lives of the enslaved as well as the enslavers.

I loved regaling my students with stories about abolitionists such as John Brown, who was born in Torrington, Connecticut, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who lived in Guilford. Although the story is likely apocryphal, President Abraham Lincoln is said to have described Stowe as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great [Civil] war.”  She lived in a household served by African American captives during her childhood. Her biographers, however, generally offer only sidelong glimpses of the enslaved men, women, and children she moved among. In his The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1890), her son Edward Stowe described how “when Harriet visited her aristocratic relatives in Guilford and was taught the catechism by her Aunt Harriet (Foote), black Dinah, along with Harry, the bound boy, ranged at a respectful distance behind her, was taught also.”

In  Autobiography, Correspondence, etc., of Lyman Beecher, edited by Charles Beecher, (Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1866)( Stowe’s father the Reverend Lyman Beecher laments the hardships of the Revolutionary War and confesses that his household would have been ruined if they had owned slaves and were required to pay taxes on them at the time. He mentions the enslaved only in passing, recalling one man named Moses who “remained a slave because he was king.” The lives of Dinah and Harry and Moses were not enlarged upon in Beecher’s papers or elsewhere.

I was frustrated by the paucity of information about the enslaved in these narratives, so I began my own research. I found hundreds of documents in local archives, and in 2017 I wrote a monograph Slavery and Freedom in Madison and Guilford, Connecticut for the Guilford Free Library’s history series. Still, I struggled to bring the local story of slavery to my students. The documents often fell flat when shared with students. What was the meaning of one woman’s “second emancipation,” if students didn’t know who she was? What was the significance of the purchase of a “negro boy” in Boston in 1727 by a David Naughty of Guilford? I was challenged by the weight of the research collected, not knowing how to bring the evidence to life.

In December 2016 I presented some of my research to a community audience at the Guilford library. In the audience, my friend Doug Nygren listened intently as an idea began to form in his mind. Nygren had been struck by how the German people wrestled with the historic crimes and trauma of the Holocaust. One result of that reckoning was the Stolpersteine, literally “stumbling stones,” project created by artist Gunter Demnig in 1992.  Stolpersteine are permanent brass and concrete markers that are set in the pavement in front of the last homes of victims of the Nazis’ genocidal persecution.

Nygren wondered whether that German idea might translate to our local situation. This idea became the Witness Stones Project, whose mission is to restore the history and honor the humanity of the enslaved individuals who helped build our community. With Demnig’s permission, over the next few months Nygren and I began developing a way to use the Stolpersteine model to identify and honor the hundreds of enslaved individuals who had lived and worked in Guilford.

My students discovered, as I had, that the histories of these men and women were recorded in the property titles, probate documents, and birth and death records archived in their own town hall on the green. They realized that these enslaved men and women lived and worked within the antique houses and churches that the students pass every day. Most importantly, the students learned to tell the stories of these men and women and children whose voices had been silenced, whose marks had been erased, whose presence had been hidden.

The first Witness Stones Project was completed by my eighth-grade students at Elisabeth C. Adams Middle School in the autumn of 2017. The students had recovered the history of Moses, the “king of the slaves” alluded to in Beecher’s autobiography. The students had seen and read the indenture document that bound Moses to the Reverend Amos Fowler, “to serve him from the day of the date hereof during the whole time and term of the natural life of the said Moses, and until his death.” The students then brought their community together to place the Witness Stone in front of town hall, where Fowler’s house had stood and where Moses had been held captive during his lifetime. While the town’s first selectman, its Connecticut state representative and senator, the lead minister of the Congregational Church, and members of the public witnessed, the students honored Moses’s life and labor with music, essays, and reflection.  Since 2017 the Witness Stones Project has partnered with 86 schools and civic institutions and has reached more than 12,000 middle- and high-school students in 45 communities across five states. Students have restored the history and honored the memory of 126 individuals.

In June 2022 students in Woodstock, Connecticut began working with the Witness Stones Project. As a teenager, I worked harvesting and baling hay in the fields in and around Woodstock. Never could I have imagined then that someday I would return with students to honor the life of a man named Cesar who toiled in those same fields. Cesar was born enslaved in 1784 in the Samuel McClellan home. In 1803 he self-emancipated and gained his freedom. On that day in June Cesar was honored with essays, poems, and music, and the students were rewarded with a more complete understanding of American history.

Witnessing the Past: Woodstock Middle School Students Pay Tribute to an Enslaved Man Born in 1784

WSP · Jun 7, 2022 ·

Student poets, Izzy Crowly and Brendon Wright share poems written about Caesar.
Viktor Toth, Superintendent of Woodstock Schools commends students after flag ceremony with Boy Scout Troop 27 in background (Brendan Wright, Jacob Twordzidlo, Blake Kudzal and Blake Robida)
First Selectman, Jay Swan, appreciates that students dove deep into Woodstock History
Students read their essays about Caesar’s life: Robert Graham, Brayden Bottone, Lorelai Fish, Bella Stilltano, Kelsey McNeil, Maylie Ganias, and Brendan Lund.
7th grade chorus sings We Shall Overcome, directed by Ms. Maria Wood
Witness Stone

By Donna Dufresne

On June 7, 2022, seventh graders from Woodstock Middle School shared evidence and insights about slavery in the dedication ceremony of a Witness Stone for a young man named Caesar, who was born enslaved in 1784 and raised with three other young men, Cit, Simon, and Prince in the Samuel McClellan home. In 1803, Caesar self-emancipated and his name never appears again in the Woodstock records.

The Woodstock Education Foundation and The Last Green Valley granted seventh grade English teacher, Christine Carter, and social studies teacher, Kyra Lit Schauer funds to research and place a Witness Stone in Woodstock. The Witness Stones Project™, “is a K-12 educational initiative whose mission is to restore the history and honor the humanity of the enslaved individuals who helped build our communities. The project provides archival research, professional teacher development, a classroom curriculum, and public programming to help students discover and chronicle the local history of slavery. The final component of the work in each community is the placement of Witness Stone Memorials, permanent landscape markers that honor enslaved individuals where they lived, worked, or worshiped. The award-winning program has spread to over eighty-six communities in five states and is rapidly growing throughout the Northeast from New Jersey to Maine.

The dedication ceremony, which took place at Roseland Park Amphitheater, included the flag ceremony and Pledge of Allegiance led by:  Brendan Wright, Jacob Twordzidlo, Blake Kudzal and Blake Robida, of Woodstock Boy Scout Troop # 27. The Reverend Kevin Downer of First Church of Woodstock opened the ceremony with an invocation. First Selectman, Jay Swan, and Viktor Toth, Superintendent of Woodstock Schools gave remarks, commending the students for their hard work and dedication.

The following students read excerpts from their essays about Caesar: Robert Graham, Brayden Bottone, Lorelai Fish, Bella Stilltano, Kelsey McNeil, Maylie Ganias, and Brendan Lund. Izzy Crowly and Brendan Wright read Poems about Caesar. It was apparent through the student essays and poems that they learned about Woodstock history on their journey to uncover Caesar’s life. While examining primary sources, students gained a snapshot of the economy, industries, agricultural practices, the thriving commerce of South Woodstock, and Samuel McClellan’s contributions to Woodstock and the Revolutionary War, giving context to Caesar’s experience.

It’s not easy to find the stories of enslaved Africans who lived and worked in Northeast Connecticut. Vital records, land records, wills, and probate records from the time of slavery in the 18 th century left a scant trail behind those who were enumerated as “negro male or female” in census data or merely mentioned as possessions in wills, such as “my negro man Cuff”. And yet, students found evidence of their existence and the reality that even the smallest of New England towns were complicit in African slave trade whether they liked it or not.

Dennis Culliton, co-founder of The Witness Stones Project, introduced keynote speaker, Pat Wilson Pheanious, chair of the Witness Stones Project BOD. Ms. Pheanious, former State Representative from Ashford, and the daughter of a Tuskegee Airman, remarked on how empowering it was for her to learn from the Witness Stone research in Guilford, her ancestors’ place in American History. By saying their names, Pheanious felt for the first time that she belonged to America as much as anyone else.

At the end of the ceremony, the Woodstock Middle School Chorus performed “We Shall Overcome,” conducted by Maria Wood. The students continued to sing the song while walking from Roseland Park to the Witness Stone site at the McClellan House where owner, Kevin Lewis, welcomed the group to unveil the stone where Caesar once lived. The Reverend Kevin Downer gave a benediction that reminded students of the higher purpose of their project. He asked the whole group to repeat the following words:

I am somebody. You are somebody. And now, in the spirit of the Witness Stone Project, join me as we declare that Everybody is somebody!

The Reverend Downer went on to challenge the students who were part of the Witness Stones Project to share their experience with others so that we might have a “more hopeful, sustainable future.

According to teacher, Christine Carter, “students were very interested in discovering elements of Woodstock history that they did not know before. They felt a kinship with Caesar in his desire to be out from under the paternalism of enslavement as they dream of also growing up and having more choices. I am grateful to have been part of this project, and I hope it will continue to bring community members together”

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