I got the names wrong. That’s the point.
The wall
A year ago I left a small Manhattan apartment for sixteen forested acres outside Stockbridge. Walking the woods, I found a low stone wall running across my land and onto my neighbors’, ignoring every boundary on the map. I went to the state’s mapping site and clicked a layer called LiDAR, which strips away the trees. There it was: a whole network of walls, my woods stitched to everyone else’s by stone.
Someone who knows the area called them Beecher walls, from when the hills were clear-cut for sheep. I had just read about the neighboring tract the Stowe family once owned, and I made the connection: Beecher, Beecher Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe. I got excited. The Underground Railroad must have run right through here.
It didn’t. The woman who led people north was Harriet Tubman. Different Harriet. And Stowe herself probably never set foot on this land; it belonged to her descendants. I’d built a thrill out of a name, the name was half wrong, and the connection was thinner than I wanted it to be. So I kept going. I read James Baldwin on Uncle Tom’s Cabin and had to hold two things at once about a book I’d filed under hero. I learned that the studio where the Lincoln Memorial was designed is down my dirt road, that W.E.B. Du Bois grew up a few miles on, and that his great-great-grandfather was enslaved nearby.
That is a walking investigation. A question from something in front of you, a wrong first answer, sources that disagree, and a better claim than the one you started with. It’s what Investigating History asks of eight and ten year olds, and it’s what I ask of them outdoors. I don’t tell students what happened here. I was wrong about it myself a year ago. They read the town and work it out.
Who I am
I’m Brett Shiel. I’ve spent 26 years in public education: classroom teacher, district leader, and for the last nine years an independent consultant working with state education agencies and districts in more than twenty states on putting high-quality curriculum into practice. Much of that work has been exactly what Investigating History asks of a school: taking a strong curriculum and making it real in a particular place with particular teachers. I’m listed by Massachusetts DESE as an Investigating History Content Learning Partner.
I live in the Berkshires and work statewide. I facilitate; I don’t lecture. The historians in your town know more than I do, and part of scouting is finding them.
Coaching & Convening
Backyard History is a program of Coaching & Convening, my advisory and facilitation practice. Two other programs run alongside it: For the Record, a middle grades literacy program for Berkshire County, and On the Same Page, a ten-week program for families with a teenager who struggles with reading.