The Berlin
Cit itiz ize en
Volume 16, Number 22
Berlin’s Only Hometown Newspaper
www.berlincitizen.com
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Church to host revolutionary event By Daniel Jackson The Berlin Citizen
Members of the 5th Connecticut Regiment will camp around the Kensington Congregational Church On Saturday, June 16, to demonstrate muskets, drills, cannon fire and Revolutionary War era life. His Majesty’s Marines have been sighted in the area. And while a skirmish might break out between the two, “It’s more like a colonial da,” said Tom Castrovinci, a reenactor with the 5th Connecticut Regiment, a division of the Continental Army which drew manpower from southern Connecticut. The Kensington Congre-
gational Church is celebrating its 300th anniversary. To celebrate, the church has tried to hold an event about once a month, said Mike Urrunaga, spokesman for the church. The church wants to show people what it was like to live back during that time and “tell the tale how Kensington Congregational shaped Berlin.” The church has put a float in the town’s Memorial Day parade and produced a skit showing the history of the church as part of its celebration. The colonial demonstration opens to the public at 9:30 a.m. and closes at 4:00 p.m. There, the living history demonstrators will cook, play period music, show 18th
Century medicine practices and teach kids how to drill with wooden muskets. Three centuries ago, KCC started when residents of Berlin peeled off from the church in Farmington and started their own local church, said the Rev. Olivia Robinson, pastor of the church. “The church was a part of the political atmosphere along with the taverns,” Castrovinci said. It was in church where people gathered and discussed the large ideas of the day. According to Robinson, the local church wasn’t just the place you went to on Sunday—it was a requirement to See British, page 10
Photo courtesy of the 5th Regiment
The British are coming! Members of the 5th Connecticut Regiment let out a yell during a reenactment of a historical skirmish.
Two students to read work at poetry festival
Memorial Day Parade
By Daniel Jackson The Berlin Citizen
Photo by Lee Roski
Col. Brad Parsons marches before the flag in the Memorial Day parade.
Two Berlin students, Alex Asel and Ellie Woznica, won the Fresh Voices Poetry contest of 2012 along with six other Connecticut students. They will perform their poetry at the Hill-Stead Museum’s Sunken Garden Poetry Festival on June 2. Eighteen students were selected out of the pool of applicants and students performed their poetry in a final vetting. “That was frightening. I was the first one to go,” said Woznica. From that event, eight students were chosen to perform their work at the 20th anniversary of the poetry festival. To prepare, each student was mentored by a poet in how to speak their poems
before the crowd attending the festival. The Sunken Garden Poetry Festival is one of the few poetry festivals in the nation of its size and prestige, said Mimi Madden, artistic director for the festival. The students will be speaking their
See Poetry, next page
Inside Calendar.................18 Faith .......................12 Health.....................17 Marketplace............23 Letters ....................14 Opinion...................14 Real Estate ............23 Schools ..................15 Seniors ...................16 Sports.....................19