Avery Point students documenting artifacts from historical homestead

Five students from the Avery Point campus are learning history direct from a primary source – a 1670 colonial house in Stonington that has been in the same family for more than 300 years.

Jodi Parada, a senior majoring in maritime studies, with a spoon she is identifying. Photo by Daniel Buttrey

The Stanton-Davis Homestead housed 12 generations of family members, who left behind diaries, furniture, clothing, quilts, and traces of their relationships with Native Americans and slaves.

Artifacts and furniture cram its rooms. The last inhabitant, John Whit Davis, left the center-chimney colonial two years ago to a non-profit group that plans to turn it into a museum.

But the Stanton-Davis Homestead Museum Inc. faces the daunting task of documenting and removing roomfuls of historic objects before it can renovate the deteriorating house.

Nancy Steenburg, adjunct history faculty member and assistant director of the Bachelor of General Studies (BGS) program at Avery Point, learned of the project’s needs from fellow Stonington Historical Association board member Fred Burdick, who is vice president and treasurer of the Stanton Davis Homestead Museum.

Steenburg arranged for students at Avery Point to hold internships at the museum. Five students, representing a range of majors in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences – history, maritime studies, English, and American studies – and a BGS student have spent months learning firsthand about the past four centuries.

They are opening trunks, inventorying objects, and learning how to research and carefully document their finds, using Past Perfect, a software system used by museum curators. They work with photographs, letters, clothing, furniture, and the tools of everyday life.

“This is the guts of history,” says Steenburg.

Dana Canastar, an American studies major, learned from papers he found in a trunk that in 1764 the Stantons lost the house, which was collateral on a mortgage, before it was sold to their relatives, the Davises.

Previously, it had been thought that the Stantons leased it to the Davises, who later bought it. Canastar searched land records in Stonington and Hartford to confirm his find.

Jane Schoonover, the BGS student, found two handwritten books of poetry by Sarah Mariah Davis in an old leather suitcase. Sarah started writing poetry and commentary when she was 14, in 1870, and continued until 1934, never publishing the pieces.

Some of it is heartbreaking, Schoonover says. Davis felt that she could have done so much more with her life if she had been educated and if she had not been the daughter and wife of farmers.

Jodi Parda, a senior majoring in maritime studies, plans to go to graduate school in museum studies as a result of working at the homestead, where she has spent hours documenting finds such as a dessert or baby spoon with the initials AD, possibly belonging to Abigail Davis.

Jay Murzyn, a senior majoring in English and history, found a collection of shells he thinks were gathered locally but are of a type no longer found in Stonington.