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09/03/2019 03:30 PMThe Witness Stones Project started as an idea to credit, acknowledge, and pay tribute to a group that has often been erased from American history: enslaved people in northern states. In its third year, the project is gaining strength, both in Guilford where it started, as well as across the state.
Dennis Culliton is a recently retired middle school social studies teacher and the project’s executive director. To him, even as it begins to stretch further and reach more people, the project is still about kids—Guilford kids in particular.
“Our goal would be to really keep churning on this project in Guilford, and every year put three stones in the ground,” he said.
For the past two years, Adams Middle School students have studied the lives and histories of slaves who lived in Guilford, using primary source documents and research provided by Culliton and Witness Stones. Their research includes wills, court documents, and church records dating all the way back to the early 1700s.
The culmination of the project is installing a brick with the name of the enslaved person near a place where that person “lived, worked, or prayed.”
Culliton said that the heart of the project is to acknowledge the atrocity of slavery and how its history formed not just the southern states, but even small New England towns like Guilford.
“If you go to a country like South Africa or Rwanda or other places where they’re dealing with awful things that happened,” said Culliton, “there’s a truth and reconciliation that happens, or that is known to be a method of getting people together...In our country, we haven’t done the truth yet.”
Culliton described growing up in Massachusetts and learning of slavery as a sort of southern sin, with New England being essentially guiltless in the atrocity. Dispelling that myth, and recognizing the role slavery played and still affects life in places like Guilford is one of the most important parts of the project, Culliton said.
The idea of Witness Stones has resonated enough that it is already spreading around the state. Culliton said West Hartford had about 1,000 students participate in the project, and this year, he presented the project to another school in Greenwich. The project also made national news last November, when Culliton connected with a living descendant of one of Guilford’s enslaved persons.
Patricia Wilson Pheanious, an Ashford resident, presided over one of the installation ceremonies of a stone after Culliton reached out to her. Her ancestors, Colliton discovered, had been enslaved Guilford in the mid 1700s.
Culliton said the project’s popularity outside of the town has caused him to reorganize. A Witness Stones committee will remain attached to the Guilford Preservation Alliance and focus on Guilford projects and events, while a new non-profit that will include Guilford volunteers along with other people outside the town will continue to find other places to expand the ideas and program of Witness Stones.
Within Guilford, Culliton says there is still a lot of ways the project can grow. He estimated that there were 85 enslaved persons in Guilford, and hopes to have a project and stone for as many of them as possible.
This November, Culliton will work with the Guilford Free Library to offer a workshop for adults that parallels the school program. That workshop will deal with a particularly horrifying event in Guilford’s history: an enslaved woman who was purchased by the selectmen of the town.
“That story illuminates the concept of how much of a regular thing it was,” said Culliton. “It was just part of what happened in those days.”
Culliton says Witness Stones have also spoken internally about expanding to elementary schools in the town, and definitely plan on installing stones in North Guilford next year.
Colliton and the project are also planning more commemorative activities for later this year, as 2019 marks 400 years since slavery began in the United States.
“It’s an ongoing kind of educational thing for the community,” said Colliton, “as well as keeping that focus on the kids, and making sure that each group of eighth graders into the future will be going through this curriculum.”