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11/17/2019 11:00 PMThe Witness Stones Project, Inc., which began as an annual program that allowed middle schoolers to delve into local history while coming into contact with the dark history and machinations of slavery in the United States, is taking another step forward as founder and Executive Director Dennis Culliton offers the program to adults for the first time.
The Guilford Free Library will host two nights of the workshop—one on Tuesday, Nov. 19 and another on Thursday, Nov. 21. This will culminate with the installation of an actual engraved stone that commemorates the life of the enslaved person in front of the place where they “lived, worked, or prayed,” according to Witness Stones’ website witnessstones.org.
The ceremony to install the stone will take place on Saturday, Nov. 23 on Water Street.
Culliton started the program while working as a social studies teacher at Adams Middle School, borrowing an idea that activists in Germany have used to commemorate holocaust victims. Participants use primary documents and various other historical resources to learn about a local enslaved person and their life, along with the norms and practices of slavery in the way it functioned in their own towns.
That program has now grown into a non-profit, which has allowed Culliton to take the ideas and curriculum to a handful of other towns, including West Hartford and Greenwich, with plans to expand even further.
One of the reasons why a program that was originally intended for 12- and 13-year-olds still works for adults, Culliton said, is because of how little anyone learns about slavery and its deep roots, particularly in the landscape of small-town New England.
“It’s not as different as you think,” Culliton said of working with the two age groups. “Because I would say, there’s very few adults that learned about Connecticut slavery during the time when they’ve learned history. It is a phenomena that was absent from our textbooks, it was absent from our lessons, it was absent from our visits to...most house museums. It isn’t a topic that most adults are familiar with.”
Acknowledging the enslaved people who contributed to towns like Guilford—people who lived and suffered and worked and raised families here—is vital not only from a historical perspective but as a way to begin recognizing and healing the wounds that still exist in the United States today due to slavery, Culliton said.
Witness Stones has already installed about a dozen markers in Guilford, after identifying more than 80 enslaved persons who lived in the town.
Though the project is still mostly focused on reaching teachers and students, Culliton said that through working with the library, he saw an opportunity to bring the ideas and knowledge of the program to any interested local resident, and see how the program might be used or adapted for a different population.
“My friends in Guilford often talk about Guilford being an incubator,” Culliton said. “Ideas that we develop locally can be used outside of Guilford, and really we can work with people who know and love us to try these things [out]. We have such a wonderful support system here in Guilford that we know that when we try something, they’ll give us wonderful feedback and they will be patient with us.”
Culliton said he could imagine the same concepts or ideas that Witness Stones operates on being applied in different ways to museums or other educational organizations.
Culliton said he has been working to share his ideas with the library and the larger Guilford community since the inception of Witness Stones, through talks and other informational meetings. This is, however, the first time people outside of a classroom will be following the same type of model students have used, in a slightly more abbreviated manner.
Culliton said the types of stories that Witness Stones discovers are always full of horror, humanity, and history. The enslaved woman who will be researched and commemorated for this iteration of the program was actually owned by the selectmen of Guilford, Culliton said, essentially making her town property. This is something that probably wasn’t unique, but certainly could come as a shock for many people living today, Culliton said.
For more information on the library program, visit www.guilfordfreelibrary.org. To learn more about Witness Stones Project, Inc., visit witnessstones.org.