of Fires, Land of Hope, Land of Learning

Finley Dunckley, Zamyra Gonzalez, and the Fifth Grade Class of 2023

If you’re looking to learn about history, there is no place like our campus at Rocky Hill Country Day School. We are the 5th grade class of 2023 and our class studied the history of our school’s campus to find out about our past. It all started when our 5th grade teacher, Mr. L., who loves history, took us on a history hike, which is when we walk around our campus while he tells us about the history of each of the buildings. We explored the third floor of Hopelands, the second floor of the Carriage House where the clock tower mechanics are (he wouldn’t let us climb up there though!). Then after a few hikes we connected with

David Thatcher, who we call, “Mr.

T.”

Mr. Thatcher is a local historian and metal detection expert. Potowomut is very special to him, and he has two loves: law enforcement and the environment. He showed us how to metal-detect and we went “treasure hunting” around our campus. Then Mr. T came back in the spring and brought one of his friends, Mr. Denniston. They brought us little metal detecting kits and gave us “Junior History Detective Badges.”

On their third visit they gave us books, maps, historic documents, and other artifacts. They also gave us a display case, and our own metal detector! We purchased a “carrot,” basically a mini metal detector that you can stick in the ground. We used the new equipment to go treasure hunting on our own. We found out that there are a lot of old nails on this campus!

After all of our work, we wanted to share our history with everyone. So after a few more history hikes, we decided that we wanted to create a project that focused on the history of our school’s campus. Our project is called, “Land of Fires, Land of Hope, Land of Learning!

- A History Project.” Our driving question was, “How can we, as 5th graders, use what we know about history and artifacts to teach others about how interesting our school’s campus is?” Our class came together and talked about what we wanted to do with our project, so we decided that for our project we wanted to create an artifact display, publish a written piece about our history, plan and do history hikes, and make a history A-B-C Book for the younger students.

From the time spent on this project we learned many different things. One interesting fact we learned was that the property was owned by many families, but the Greene’s owned [the Rocky Hill campus] first in 1686. In 1948 Nathan Hale bought Hopelands for only $35,000 and turned it into a school. We also learned that in order to be a good historian, you need to be willing to do lots of research, take the time to do it, care enough about it, and never give up.