School News: Honoring the Legacy of Enslaved Persons

Summer 2020

Like other students across the country, eighth graders at The Country School (CT) have learned about slavery as part of a US history curriculum exploring abolitionism, the Underground Railroad, and the Civil War. But since the start of the 2019–2020 school year, these lessons have extended well beyond the books and reached closer to home. Students now hear a more complete and accurate narrative that honors the legacies of the people who helped build their New England community of Madison. 
 
Through a cross-curriculum project, and working in collaboration with the Witness Stones Project, thanks to a grant from Teaching Tolerance, students in history, English, and art classes studied the life of an enslaved woman named Lettuce, who lived in their town and was owned by a local minister and later freed. The project was led by English teacher Kristin Liu and history teacher Heather Butler, working with Dennis Culliton, a former eighth grade history teacher who co-founded the Witness Stones Project in neighboring Guilford.
 
Since starting the project in 2017, Culliton has helped students commemorate the lives of slaves by researching and sharing untold stories and then installing brass memorials, or Witness Stones, near where these individuals lived and worked. This past fall, with Culliton’s guidance, Country School students began to research Lettuce’s life through an exploration of wills, deeds, birth and death records, and other primary source documents. They were asked to think about how Lettuce’s life was documented at the time and to bring a contemporary understanding to the analysis. They had a chance to go beyond the textbooks and wrote, painted, and made music about Lettuce. They also developed a website for the project. They talked about why it’s important to dig into the past and how telling these stories can be part of the healing process. 
 
“There’s a sense of pride that they are telling an important and, until now, unknown story,” says Elizabeth Lightfoot, who works in community outreach and alumni relations for the school and helped facilitate the project. “Students have responded thoughtfully, creatively, and incredibly passionately.”
 
Thanks to the work of Country School students, Madison residents will be able to remember Lettuce when they visit her Witness Stones memorial, installed in front of the church near where she worked, lived, and died 200 years ago.
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A cross-curriculum project and collaboration with the Witness Stones Project allowed Country School students to study the life of an enslaved woman named Lettuce, who lived in their town of Madison, Connecticut.
 
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