Hello! We are Nicole, Maggie, Natalie, and Caroline, and we are four seniors from East Lyme High School who, for months, have been working on a project of our own in the hopes to highlight local history. This is the release of our project, which is called “History in the Making.” This is a website with three components: a blog, which we will update weekly with educational articles and stories, a resources page where we will upload educational tools and media, an announcements page where we hope to reach more people about the local history events happening in our town, and a gallery page with photos of our experiences. We are so excited to share this with our community! 

 

Walking into the Samuel Smith house reminded of the simple necessities that truly aren’t necessities in modern history. I enjoy cooking dinner and dessert for my family and in the morning I love to make coffee; simple things which we all take for granted. Let’s take making coffee for example. First, I turn my lights on if it’s still dark out then I get the coffee filter out and measure some coffee grounds to fill it with. Next, I go to the kitchen sink and turn on the water; measuring the equal amounts compared to the coffee I put in earlier. Next I brew the coffee. Now rewind to 1685—no electricity so no lights, no automatic water, no coffee machine, no coffee. This is but a simple example of the things in life which we do not appreciate until we are reminded of how much we truly have. Now fast forward to modern times, we complain when the electricity goes out during a hot summer night. Take the storm that just occurred in Atlantic hurricane season. The power was out for a couple nights and everyone had something to say about it. Historic sites are so precious to our community because they remind us of how far we’ve progressed as a society and how much we truly have. 

-Maggie 

 

Recently, I watched the historic Flowers house on Boston Post Road get torn down to be replaced by a Dollar General. I was angered by the demolition, and I know many will say it was better for the town and will make us money, and others will say it’s because I’m too hesitant of change, but I truly believe that changes should be made if they are for the better, and I believe preserving our local history is one of the best things we can do. I know many others were angered by the destruction of the Flowers house as well, as I signed a petition that was going around to stop the demolition, and I read in the paper about a survey that went around to the residents of East Lyme asking if they wanted more development. The answer? A resounding no. People like the small town feeling, and everything that goes into creating that atmosphere. The problem is that people aren’t aware that many of the things we like about East Lyme are always at risk of being demolished and replaced with something “bigger and better”, such as another large corporation. Therefore, although the Flowers House first piqued my interest in the historic houses of East Lyme, I’ve realized that there are many more places, people, and stories which make up our local history and community. My goal in this project is to highlight those people, places and stories, not from the perspective of historians, as people have seen before, but from the perspective of an everyday teenage girl in 2020. As a result, I hope that this helps people see that we can play a part in a story greater than ourselves that will be told through time, even in just our small community, because history is always in the making. 

-Nicole

 

I think it is really important to understand how people lived in the past, because it gives us more appreciation for the people who lived before us. I hadn’t really learned much about local history before this summer,  but I now think it is important for everyone to do so. It is great for us to be able to learn things and have a visual way of doing so, like looking at pictures or drawings. It helps us better understand how different the way they lived was and how much we should appreciate everything we have today. It is also very interesting to know what people did and how they did things where you live. It is cool getting to see how people used the woods and water around your house, and that they often lived very similarly to us. I love to draw, and I think it would be great for me to draw certain pieces of history, and help people see how the people of our town lived in the past. I think that people our age are very likely to look at pictures of past buildings and people, and this way they will be able to learn things they may not have had access to learning before. My goal is for the information of the towns’ past to be more accessible and understandable to people my age, and for people to have more interest in the information.

-Natalie

 

I have always been interested in history, but I never had the chance to experience our town’s history until recently. Spending time at the Samuel Smith House as well as speaking with people who grew up here made me gain a greater appreciation for the tradition and legacy of East Lyme. It fascinates me how people who lived here hundreds of years ago may have dressed differently, ate different foods, and moved through their everyday lives without technology or even electricity, but they still saw the same trees, oceans, sunrises, and sunsets. The way they experienced the natural world is largely the same as we do today. Through this project, I aim to educate myself and others about local history through providing insight into topics we can all relate to: fashion, food, fun, and family. People who lived here decades and centuries ago experienced firsthand the events that we read and learn about. Those experiences impacted their daily lives. I want to help bridge the gap between then and now, because we ourselves are experiencing history in the making right this moment.

-Caroline