Huwerl Thornton, Jr.
No matter what grade I teach, every year I take my students on a walking field trip to the Grove Street Cemetery. I have taken a class there for a field trip at least once a school year since 2002. The Grove Street Cemetery has a wide variety of headstones and grave markers to identify where a person is buried in the cemetery. Some of these elaborate headstones are beautiful and artistic. These wonderful memorials commemorate the life of a loved one. Other stones are very simple and have a quiet beauty that expresses just as much love as the big elaborate grave markers. One of the reasons I bring my students to the Grove Street Cemetery is because there are many famous New Haveners who are buried there. This is important because our school is on 55 Foote St. We walk down Foote St. until we reach Ashmun St. We then walk on Ashmun St. until we reach the Grove Street Cemetery. Why is this important? Andrew Hull Foote is buried in the Grove Street Cemetery as well as Yehudi Ashmun. Both of these people have connections to New Haven and were important figures in history. Andrew Hull Foote was an Admiral in the United States Navy who served during the Civil War. During the time of 1849 to 1851, Foote patrolled the African coast. This experience caused Foote to become a very vocal abolitionist. Yehudi Ashmun was a young Congregationalist minister who served as governor of the newly created Liberia from 1822 to 1828. During the crucial early formative years of Liberia, Ashmun’s courage, versatility, and energy was largely responsible for the security and progress of the new settlements. Even today, the main street that runs through Monrovia, the capital of Liberia is named after Ashmun. Yehudi had devoted his life to the resettlement of Blacks in Africa. This creates a connection to my students that was never there before. New Haven is rich with street names that are named after real people and not some composite, arbitrary items in nature like Meadowbrook. It hopefully opens their minds to be more curious about other street names like Whitney Avenue (Eli Whitney-inventor of the cotton gin and guns with interchangeable parts), Sherman Avenue (Roger Sherman-the first mayor of New Haven and the only person to sign all four great state papers of the United States), and Dwight Street (Timothy Dwight-American Congregationalist minister and eighth president of Yale University from 1795 to 1817). Many of the people buried in the Grove Street Cemetery were very important not only to New Haven history, but United States history as well.
As I began to do research into memorials, I started to realize the naming of a street after someone
is
creating a memorial. It dawned on me that this way of thinking also applies to buildings as well. My school is named after two outstanding educators who made a difference in the lives of New Haven children, Helene W. Grant and Isadore Wexler. Unfortunately, both of these wonderful teachers have since passed away, but the fact that a school has been named after each one is still important to their relatives and the students whose lives they impacted. I know this first hand because when the merger between the two schools was happening, there was a small discussion amongst the staff of Helene W. Grant, of which I was a part of, about approaching the district and asking the powers that be about dropping the Isadore Wexler name and just renaming the new school Helene W. Grant. We quickly realized that to drop the name of Isadore Wexler would probably be hurtful to his family as well as to his former students and colleagues. Thus the name of our school is Wexler-Grant. New Haven has a few schools that have merged and rather than dropping one name and keeping the other, or renaming the school all together, New Haven has combined the names of the two schools. For example, there is King-Robinson, Conte-West Hills, and Ross-Woodward to name a few. It is important for New Haven to keep a small legacy of these amazing people alive through the naming of its schools.
I want this unit to focus on creating memorials for people who are still alive. Specifically, I want to focus on people who are relatives of my students. There are many examples of memorials that have been created while people are still alive. The Dean Center in North Carolina, Chapel Hill is named after Dean Smith, longtime basketball coach of the University of North Carolina. John Daniels School in New Haven is named after the former mayor John Daniels. Both Smith and Daniels are still alive. I want my students to understand what commemorate means and to create a memorial of their own. I want my students to create a variety of art forms to represent a memorial of someone they love. I want them to create a memorial for themselves. We will use songs, poems, drawings, and sculptures. We will explore the creation of early 18
th
and 19
th
century memorials via the Grove Street Cemetery through modern day memorials like the Amistad memorial in front of city hall and different war memorials.