Photo by Lester Smith
A Loyalist businessman’s wife listens to a colonist’s complaints about how King George has been overtaxing his American subjects. The Loyalist is Mrs. Pam Bowen, a museum educator re-enactor; the colonist/student speaking is Sonia Kerongo.
McAlister Intermediate School, for a number of years, has devoted a spring day to immersing the entire fifth grade in the Civil War, with widely-recognized success. This year, in keeping with new curriculum requirements, and on two days, not one, the fifth graders experienced the Revolutionary War. All involved agreed that Co-Generals Kara Forrest and Kelly Meyer, the teachers who put the program together from scratch, succeeded admirably. And our side won again.
Parents were asked to dress their kids as colonists. A team of six museum educators were engaged from Roseland, the museum house in Woodstock, Conn., run by Historic New England (formerly the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities). They performed costumed reenactments and did many of the demonstrations. One British soldier and two Colonial reenactors came to handle the military work. And teachers, many parents, and one Board of Ed chairman helped variously, dressed in period garb.
All day Thursday, June 1, the colonials moved from room to room and among stations outside, experiencing nine aspects of the war and its time period. One station had a Loyalist woman trying to persuade a group of young colonists early in the turbulent mid-1770s that the new excise taxes were necessary and appropriate. They were needed to repay King George’s expenses protecting the colonists from the French and the Indians in the recent war. This was a very interactive session. In another room, the students learned about the crude medical practices of the time. The students came away with arms in slings and well covered with “bloody” bandages. Outside they talked with a militia soldier, practiced military drill, and played a large-scale Revolutionary War trivia board game.
Everyone then gathered in the auditorium for a significant historical reading. Mr. Fontaine, dressed and wigged as Thomas Jefferson, held a big scroll and read the Declaration of Independence. While Mr. Fontaine was not as persuasive a Jefferson as last year’s speaker was a Lincoln, his delivery was excellent, with fervor and appropriate emphasis. And the famous Declaration, slightly edited, seemed a better length than the long dissertation of Lincoln’s reenactor. The day ended with two rounds of flint-lock musket fire demonstrations outside.
Photo by Lester Smith
Reenactor Kevin Johnson shouts “FREEDOM!” As a postscript to the fifth grade’s Revolutionary War Day, he’s shouting for the concept, not his name, reenacting the role of soldier George Freedom in the Battle of Groton Heights.
The next morning brought the students back to the auditorium for a special reenactment by Kevin Johnson, whose day job is in the history room of the Connecticut State Library. He played the role of George Freedom, a black orderly for Col. William Ledyard at Fort Griswold during the Battle of Groton Heights, our state’s major engagement of the war and a bloody loss for the colony. It resulted in the burning of New London and the loss of many ships. Both George Freedom and Col. Ledyard were killed at the Fort. Johnson’s vigorously enthusiastic and realistic portrayal and his subsequent Q & A with the students were both educational and entertaining. An interesting twist of his story is that Freedom was a free black, and the joyous importance of that freedom shines throughout Johnson’s performance.