University of Connecticut |
Open house: 350 years within these wallsTracing the past
Dana Canastar, an American studies major, learned from papers he found in a trunk that the Stantons in 1764 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 wife and daughter 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 that he thinks were gathered locally, of a type that are no longer found in Stonington. A vantage point on historyWhit Davis, as he is known, is president of the museum. He no longer lives in the house, but he still harvests the salt marsh hay as his ancestors did, starting in 1654. He sold the future development rights to the 258-acres of farmland to the state.
The farm's bounty once fed Washington's troops in the Continental Army and provisioned whaling ships. The objects in the house span centuries and styles. A soldier's blue and red coat from the Revolutionary War was found in a paper bag. According to folklore, a drop-leaf table in the parlor was used by Uncas, the Mohegan sachem, when he wrote his will.
Open the drawer of an 1845 cherry and curly maple butler's chest and you can find a pill container filled with pebbly objects, labeled, "John L. Davis's 40 gallstones." Open a trunk and there is a diary logging the daily work of the Davises from the 1500s, when they farmed in England, to Long Island, where they first settled on this side of the Atlantic, to the Stonington property.
Just outside the house is the 442-pound "Venture stone," named for the slave-turned-freeman Venture Smith, who is said to have lifted it. Venture once lived in the Thomas Stanton, Jr. house, three quarters of a mile away. Nearby in the Davis cemetery lie the remains of Cuff Stanton, a contemporary of Venture who was born in Africa and enslaved. He took the place of his owner, Zebulon Stanton, as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, says Steenburg. That earned him freedom, and he became a preacher. His epitaph reads, "Thought to be a Christian." The attic of the Stanton-Davis House bears marks of the slaves who lived there. Primitive drawings of slave ships and figures are etched and carved into the low beams of the attic eaves, where the slaves slept.
The task of sorting and researching the objects so captivated the interns that they volunteered to come back and continue the work after their internships ended. Fred Burdick shares their fascination and recalls his first tour of the house, when he threaded his way through rooms packed with objects from the past and gave up counting the number of chairs at 75. "I never stopped having goose bumps for two hours," he says. For more information on the Stanton Davis Homestead, go to http://www.stantondavishomestead.org/ Photos by Daniel Buttrey |
