Photo by Lester Smith
Re-enactor Pam Bowen from Ellington, in the role of a Southern plantation owner’s wife, defends the South’s practice of slavery against the questions and arguments of a group of Yankee soldiers.
All the fifth grade classes at McAlister Intermediate School were wrapped up in the American Civil War on June 2 in the school’s customary spring event with a great group of re-enactors: the 9th Massachusetts Light Artillery. During a day-long engagement, the students experienced close-order drill practice, learned rifle and cannon-firing procedures, discussed camp life and food, sang contemporary music, and wrote letters home from camp. They got bandaged and splinted for their wounds, listened to a surgeon describe his field hospital work, watched a cannon being fired – twice – and finally withstood a 40-minute lecture by an excellent incarnation of Abraham Lincoln.
But this was to be the last of McAlister’s decade-long series of Civil War Days. Next year, from a locally determined curriculum change, the Revolutionary War will be taught in intermediate school, while the Civil War will be taught in middle school. One can hope that a new re-enactment tradition will be established for our fifth graders, this time with the Rebels, a.k.a. Patriots, forcing their British oppressors to surrender. Happily, in both of these profoundly significant events, Connecticut was among the winners.
Photo by Lester Smith
Young Nicholas Gadomski waits on the operating table for his shattered forearm to be amputated, while a field hospital surgeon, Capt. Tom Dengler, exhibits a sample of a broken bone.
Photo by Lester Smith
Near the end of McAlister’s Civil War Day, Board of Education chair Jeanne Gee, garbed in a period outfit, speaks to the assembled soldiers. She closed with an ingenious rewording of Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address, hoping that “. . . the lessons of history shall not die in vain.”
Photo by Lester Smith
As some of the young Rebel soldiers cover their ears, General Kelly Meyer, fifth grade teacher and co-chair of the Civil War Day, pulls the lanyard to fire the 110-pound Parrott rifled cannon of the 9th Massachusetts Light Artillery.