Students to share local histories at regional forum

KENT, Conn.—Several students from Region 1 have discovered some unique local history and are ready to share it with the community.

Five students from South Kent School and 41 students from Housatonic Valley Regional High School will participate in the upcoming fourth annual Troutbeck Symposium, a student-led historical education forum.

Students will join their peers from 14 middle- and high-school regional and independent schools to present and discuss their findings April 30 through May 2 in Amenia, N.Y.

The symposium celebrates local histories that have been lost, buried or ignored.

HVRHS teacher Peter Vermilyea, who oversees this year’s Troutbeck team, expressed his excitement for all of HRVHS’ projects. 

Troutbeck “is like the best day of the year,” he said. “It’s like Christmas for a history teacher. Students can be outstanding local historians. When [we] have the local story, [we] can find the themes in national history.”

Ross LaBlond, humanities teacher at the private SKS, said he is proud of his students. “I can’t say enough positive things about the work these boys have done,” he said.

This is the first time SKS is taking part in the symposium and the fourth for HVRHS.

SKS students researched, wrote, and produced an eight-minute documentary about Florence Chandler Maybrick, an American charged and convicted of murdering her husband, Englishman James Maybrick, while living in the United Kingdom in 1889.

Maybrick, who served nearly 15 years, moved to Connecticut after her release from prison. 

Students at HVRHS, the public high school that serves Region 1, including Kent, completed eight different projects.

Their work consists of three short films, one art exhibition and four poster exhibitions. The topics explore environmental history, Jim Crowe laws and the Nuremberg Race Laws, Troutbeck, Boston Corners, place names, witchcraft as well as Nazi camps and how local communities fought back in the 1930s.

South Kent School

Maybrick’s story is known internationally, but few locals are aware of the Alabama-born socialite who was imprisoned for allegedly murdering her husband.

Even fewer know about her short-lived career upon her return to the States as a traveling lecturer promoting prison reform, while also proclaiming her innocence.

Despite Maybrick’s later years living around the corner from South Kent School on the Gaylordsville/Kent town line, her interactions with SKS students, and her burial on the campus, the South Kent community doesn’t speak of her today, in part because they don’t know her story, according to Lablond.

The students want to educate the public about her role in history — and with SKS.

“After I learned about [Maybrick’s] relationships with the SKS students here, it [reinforced to] me that SKS isn’t just a school, it’s a family,” said sophomore Jason Z.

Jason spoke of the bond and compassion administration and students shared with Maybrick, who toward the end of her life, had few friends. 

In Connecticut Maybrick used her maiden, Chandler, to maintain her privacy and shared her story with few in her neighborhood.

She watched the construction of SKS and its opening in 1923, and over time developed a bond with some of the administration and students, who delivered firewood, milk and meals to her home. She supported the boys in their endeavors and helped in the infirmary when needed.

“She didn’t like talking to adults—there were very few she talked to,” LaBlond related. “The boys were innocent and that was a breath of fresh air for someone who had spent nearly 15 years in prison.”

Sophomore Sid D. described his excitement about the project, saying he was impressed with his “school’s connections to things that are important in history.” 

Most individuals who endured what Maybrick did—she spent nine months in solitary confinement with a view of the gallows right outside her cell—would have broken, the student said. But once she was released, she “kept her focus on what she wanted to do and started teaching about the wrongdoings of women’s prisons and making a difference.”

Students learned more about Maybrick from SKS archivist Marge Smith and New Milford author Ron Suresha, both of whom have explored Maybrick’s story.

“It’s been so cool to have both Marge and Ron,” LaBlond said. “They provided a lot of sources, whether it’s books or documents. It’s so helpful to have them connect the students with other people in the community.”

Smith said she is “impressed” with the students’ work and how it fits into Troutbeck’s mission so unearth important local histories. Maybrick’s prison reform work helped England realize it needed a Court of Appeals, she said.

Motions have been filed in a British appeals court to turn over the conviction of Maybrick.

LaBlond said the school’s participation in Troutbeck was sparked by a conversation he had with a teacher in the region. He shared that he wanted to “do something bigger, something that would take us beyond our campus.”

Sid said it feels “great” to take on a project of this magnitude and that he wants to “set the bar high.”

“It feels amazing,” LaBlond said of the school’s participation in Troutbeck. “I don’t think SKS really grasps yet what this is going to be. This is going to be special.”

HVRHS

Up at Housatonic Valley Regional High School, a small group of students, including junior Elizabeth Forbes, a Kent Center School graduate, created a graphic design that explores Troutbeck’s origin and history, and how individuals connected to it were involved in important national movements and ideas. 

“It was really interesting to see all of the people and connections that happened right over the border [in New York] right near us—and how important Troutbeck was,” related Forbes, who lives in Wassaic, N.Y.

“I feel like people know it now as a fancy place, a pretty place, but to see the actual history of it is really interesting,” she said.

Her group attended an open house at Troutbeck where they learned about past owners and visitors. Through extensive research, they learned that many individuals who resided at or visited were engaged in civil rights and reform movements, literature, architecture, social events, politics, World War I and more.

Troutbeck has been an estate, a country inn and tavern since the 1700s. Its original owner, poet and naturalist Myron Benton, and later owners, Colonel John and Amy Spingarn, have significant ties to different aspects of American history.

Troutbeck was visited by key historical figures such as Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Burroughs, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and President Theodore Roosevelt.

“It was a lot of research and a lot of dead ends,” Forbes said. But she added her group was able to draw lines that sometimes linked individuals to three or four categories.

This group consisted of  Elizabeth Forbes, Madison Melino, Anthony Labbadia, Sara Ireland, and Lauren Sorrell.

Another group of HVRHS students focused on the challenges to clean water in American history. The students incorporated two quotes about the Housatonic River in their poster project, one from John Burroughs and the other from W.E.B Du Bois.

“I found it interesting because we not only researched local water contamination crises, but we researched national things and even Dudleytown,” said project participant Celeste Trabucco of Kent.

She said the group wanted to draw attention to crises such as that in Flint, Mich., in 2014 which resulted from the city’s switch to the Flint River as its water source and subsequent contamination due to inadequate water treatment.

The group spoke with a Flint resident who continues to work to correct the issues.

“It lasted so long because it affected a group of minorities and the government didn’t do much,” Forbes, a junior, said.

In addition to the water crisis in Flint, the students also explored waterways such as the Housatonic, Naugatuck and Shepaug rivers.

Students Ayden Wheeler, Richie Crane, Alexa Meach, Madison Melino, Anna Gillette, Lily Beurket, and Celeste worked on this project.

The third poster project was created by Silas Tripp, Maddy Johnson, Ava Segalla, Katie Crane, Kierra Greene, Ava McDougall, and Allegra Ferri.

Their project examined the incident when, in the 1930s, the American Nazi party set up a camp in Southbury, Conn., an attempt to recruit individuals and the steps local residents took to fight it.

Another group of students dove into how the early regime of Nazis sent a team of lawyers to America in the 1930s to study the Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation and discrimination against African Americans in the South.

Students Cole Simonds, Everet Belancik, Graham Belancik, Ariana Danforth-Gold, and Peter Austin drew connections between America’s Jim Crow laws and Nazi Germany’s  antisemitic and racist laws.

Vermilyea described a solo art exhibit that examines Joel and Amy Spingarn’s ownership of Troutbeck for the better part of the 1900s. The couple was active in the Civil Rights Movement and Spingarn was a chairman of the NAACP.

“Amy was also an artist and drew or painted many of the great civil rights leaders,” Vermilyea said.

Alex Woodworth explored several of Amy’s drawings/portraits and created his own based on his modern civil rights heroes.

Another group of four students — Adam Hock, Steven Barber, Ibby Sadeh, and Olivia Brooks — turned their attention to the history and significance of place names in the region. They chose Old Asylum Road and created an eight-minute film that tells the story of the road’s naming. 

“It shows how early 19th-century America treated and cared for the less fortunate,” the teacher said. “Their historical research and content is spectacular,” he added.

Witchcraft was examined by Shanaya Duprey, Hannah Johnson, Mia DiRocco, Chloe Hill, Owen Riemer, and Wesley Allyn.

One student used Kent’s Molly Fisher story “to explore accusations of witchcraft in Colonial Connecticut, landing squarely on the idea of gender norms in the colony and the dangers posed to a woman who stepped out of the established gender norms,” Vermilyea explained. 

An interview with representatives from the Connecticut Witch Trial Exoneration Project is part of this presentation.

“They’ve done a really good job,” he said, adding the student is working with a filmmaker who graduated from HVRHS.

For the first time in the symposium’s history, a collaborative project created by students from two schools will be featured at Troutbeck.

HVRHS students Mollie Ford, Neve Kline, Victoria Brooks, Simon Markow, Abram Kirshner, and Marc Hafnerand teamed up with Salisbury School students and made a short film about the Boston Corners Boxing Match.

In the mid-1800s, Boston Corners, located about 30 miles north of Kent, was considered to be both in New York and Massachusetts, but was not officially in either. As such, law could not be enforced and it became a hangout and a popular destination for criminals and fugitives. 

In 1853, a prize fight between Irish immigrants and prominent boxers, Yankee Sullivan and John Smoke Morrissey, was held. They represented different aspects of Irish culture and were tied to different political parties and gangs in New York. The fight drew thousands of people who traveled by train to see the illegal match, Vermilyea recounted.

The teacher said HVRHS made its first film for Troutbeck two years ago and presented another last year.

The multiple films for the 2025 symposium are impressive, he said, adding “they’re all really, really fantastic and important topics for different reasons.”