Blog Your Blessings: Walking Down 200 Years


I joined my daughter and her class on a field trip around the historical sites of our little town of Woodbury this week. She is one of 20 lively kids who managed to hold relay races; pick flowers for sweethearts; discuss the gummy bear qualities of calamari, the trouble of planting irises sideways, and seasonal allergies; and get every trucker to honk his horn yet managed to safely walk down the road and two hundred years back in time.

We visited the Glebe House, the birthplace of the Episcopal Church in America. There the first bishop was selected from among Connecticut clergy and later consecrated in Scotland in an effort to preserve the traditions of this faith without lugging around the political baggage of loyalty to the British crown. That was an important consideration and a form of health insurance for Anglicans during the Revolutionary years.

We checked out the Glebe House kitchen with its rope bed up against the wall, apples drying along the fireplace, and pewter chargers. We did not touch anything in this house on a street that was once one of the richest in America.

We listened to a storyteller as she spun some local yarns that kept all of us in rapt silence for half an hour on a hard-as-nails wide-board floor. We checked out one of the town's four remaining one-room schoolhouses and learned that all the kids shared germs by drinking from the same bucket of water supplied by whoever lived closest. The biggest kid tended the fire. The older kids tutored the younger ones, and children used soapstone to write on their slates because paper was so dear and chalk was nowhere around.

Recess back then was unsupervised and perfectly safe because there was no road full of horn-honking truckers out front, only grass. We learned that kids kept their horn books with them all the time so that they could fill every possible moment with learning. That horn would have come from cattle, and it was also used for holding gun powder forming a drinking glass. Call it colonial plastic. It was everywhere and ever so durable. You could drink out of a 250-year-old horn glass if you wanted; it wouldn't leak. .

Times for practicing reading might have popped up between serving adults their meals, clearing the table, fetching water, knitting, sewing, mending, helping with the animals, and, at long last, tightening the bed ropes for a sleep-tight-don't-let-the-bed-bugs-bite kind of night atop a mattress full of corn husks or pine needles or what have you.

And of course they showed us the graffiti in the window of the Glebe House and on the walls of the schoolhouse. Old graffiti in places that make history is venerated, I learned. In fact, when the old schoolhouse was restored and the clapboards replaced, the men who rebuilt it recreated some old graffiti so new generations could imagine what the wall might have looked like carved full of initials, the work of young, unsupervised pen-knife artists at play. Were they special, the letters that started the names of the kids who had gone this way before?

I think so.



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25 Comments

  1. the time with your daughter is a real blessing. thanks for sharing...

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  2. Nice story and wonderfull photography!!!

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  3. I love history - and taking children to see it. This time you spend with your own daughter whilst enjoying (I hope) the wonder and excitement and learning of little ones... Priceless.

    I can feel your pleasure as you write. I think in England we are "spoiled" for history (we often learn of Americans' "wonderment" that we have buildings hundreds and thousands of years old.)

    We take too much for granted here - and need to get out more!

    Your WW and Skywatch are beautiful too but thought I'd just mention it here as I am on catch up!

    I have another post up just after your last visit (was posting as you visited!) - thanks for coming over.

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  4. Thanks Sandy. I love old places and old stories -especially when they are older than me.:)

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  5. A beautiful post that had all kinds of pictures jumping in my mind...
    Tom

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  6. Thanks for dropping by my blog. Thanks also for sharing your historical tour. Lots of info and learn a lot. Like your last line about old graffiti.I didn't know it was an old art. Have a nice Mother's Day!

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  7. Sandy, thanks for the tour! The slide show is wonderful and shows me what everything looked like! How lovely a place! :D

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  8. I've been on tours like this many times. There's nothing like seeing & feeling history! I'm sure you both enjoyed this lovely look back!

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  9. Sandy, thanks for participating in my "What if" meme. I really appreciate it. I've posted the results now so take a look. :D

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  10. Love the mention of old graffiti, Sandy

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  11. It seems like a hundred years when I went to a migrant grammer school in Morganville New Jersey. There was 7 sttudents and my Teacher Was Mrs Crime. She ale\as carried a yard stick for respect and she got it from mabh and beast. One day in the fields that qwe were working she chased the farmer and we were in school more often.

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  12. Anonymous9:52 PM

    Being with our loved ones is really a blessing that some people does not realize. Thanks for sharing.

    Happy Mother's Day! :)

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  13. honestly WOW!-dom comes to mind :)

    would love to have an experience like that. thanks for the sharing & lovely pix too! (reminds me of pieces I used to do for art - loved to paint land/town/urbanscapes)

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  14. Anonymous6:17 AM

    Nice pictures and good history. Thanks for sharing with us.

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  15. Anonymous7:01 AM

    Hi! I liked your blog and will have to come back for more if you don't mind.Kids are always happy out door :) .Wishing you well

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  16. Nice show Sandy. I saw the kids walking around, it was a beautiful day for it. Happy Mom's day to you!

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  17. Beautiful history lesson Sandy! Happy BYB Sunday, and Happy Mother's Day!

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  18. There's also tales that "Tying the Knot" as a marriage reference has something to do with roper-beds... in terms of them needing to be "re-tied" or otherwise manipulated to hold two people.

    Great BYB as always!

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  19. Anonymous9:46 AM

    I remember going on field trips with my boys and their school, wonderful memeories aspecially today.

    I hope you have a nice mothers day Sandy

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  20. Anonymous10:23 AM

    the field trip sounds a lot of fun and those pics are nice!

    happy mother's day, sandy!!

    got here from luke's photo blog. =D

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  21. i like to meet people who loves telling stories. they usually have good lessons to pass on.

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  22. To have so little but really having so much. Lesson to be learned from them!

    Happy Mother's Day!

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  23. Restoring graffiti? Now that is an interesting idea! Come to think of it, what better indication of what the kids were actually thinking of during that time?

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  24. Spending quality time with our children is a great blessing indeed! And graffiti even back then! Mock horror! :-) Happy Belated Mother's Day!

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Thanks for being here.