GOOD Morning Wilton received two letters in response to the recent op-ed written by historian Dr. Julie Hughes about Wilton’s recent celebration of Juneteenth.
Wilton’s Lost African American History
To the Editor:
Thank you to Dr. Julie Hughes for her story on the Juneteenth Celebration at Our Lady of Fatima Roman Catholic Church. What a wonderful, rich history of Wilton the OLF program has revealed! Seeing the fuller history of our town’s roots gives me a much deeper appreciation of our history and culture, and fills in many gaps in our cultural heritage.
When my family first moved here in 1984, I thought Wilton didn’t have much culture or history to talk about except for the usual Tories and Patriots vibe. Over the years, I have come to really value our town’s deep and complex history. There is so much for us and our children to learn from. It just gets better and richer. I really love this town!
I heartily hope that the Town and our Planning and Zoning Commission can find a way to purchase and preserve these two extremely rare markers of this nearly forgotten town history. I cannot imagine how much would be lost to us if we allowed the last house to be occupied by formerly enslaved people to be demolished, or the old burial ground to be built over! Perhaps 232 Danbury Rd. could become our African History Society, a fitting adjunct to the Wilton Historical Society a short walk down the road! I would happily donate to fundraising for the purpose!
Madeleine Wilken
Something specific to honor past Wiltonians of color as we actively making things better now and in the future
To the Editor:
Juneteenth is now a federal holiday and appropriately so, marking as it does the announcement to a whole state’s formerly enslaved people that they were at last free.
Wilton has done its own remarkable job of acknowledging this holiday thanks to the work of Father Reggie Norman of Our Lady of Fatima Parish (who is also president of the National Association of Black Catholic Administrators) in organizing the very well-attended and inspiring Juneteenth observance at OLF. He was joined as a speaker by our First Selectman Toni Boucher and by the Wilton History Room’s Dr. Julie Hughes and also by lively musicians in spirited and uplifting singing.
Toni Boucher beautifully put this observance in its broad historical context, and Julie Hughes eloquently carried it into the much more local scene in Fairfield County generally and Wilton specifically. Fr. Norman drove home the message in powerful terms but filled with words of love too, not pointing fingers at anyone alive today for the past but asking us all to let history tell its story truthfully so that we can understand more fully how we’ve come to the present and appreciate better how much further we need to go to make racial equality a reality in deed as well as in word. As he said so forcefully, “Let’s not run from the past but rather learn from it” so that we can be an active part of making things better.
Hughes brought local history to life with her description of what Wilton’s Black residents faced in discrimination even after slavery ended (either for them individually under our state’s gradual emancipation laws — first enacted in 1784 — or when slavery ended for all remaining enslaved persons in our state in 1848). Their lives reflected important accomplishments in the face of struggles of daunting magnitude, and Hughes offered multiple examples of those accomplishments in everything from achieving home ownership and setting up businesses like laundering or grounds-and-farm-animal care to fighting bureaucrats who heartlessly took away modest war-veteran pension benefits from a widow who was able, through her relentless efforts, to gain them back successfully at least for a time.
Hughes underscored that while historical records from this era are rather plentiful for white residents, unearthing similar background on Black residents, whether enslaved or free, is a challenging task. Hughes has been a key figure over the past several years in discovering that evidence by carefully scouring all sorts of public and private records — from store accounts and wills (describing enslaved persons as chattel moving by bequest to new “owners”) to church records (baptismal, marriage, death), town land records, federal census and veteran’s pension records, and state court records.
Some of her most recent research has unearthed the fact that there is a largely-lost-to-memory Spruce Bank Cemetery occupying at least a quarter acre at 331 Danbury Rd. in which Black residents and possibly also Native Americans were buried. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) has confirmed the existence of graves, and archeological work can provide more detailed information.
The graves are on a parcel of land now slated for development, and neither the landowner nor the prospective developer (who had submitted pre-application plans) were aware of the cemetery until Hughes did her research. Hughes noted that while state authorities can offer recommendations, the final decision-making on this subject is up to Wilton’s Planning and Zoning Commission (P&Z), and she encourages residents to let our views be known about properly respectful treatment of this cemetery, including an appropriate border around it and explicit markings acknowledging its presence.
Any prospective developer will certainly now be aware of this discovery and is likely to be very sensitive to its significance and anxious to handle it properly and respectfully. And that is good news. There’s no reason to think that an attractive-to-the-development acknowledgement of the site and contribution to its preservation and recognition would not be in the best interests of both the developer and our town.
P&Z can further protect the burial site in multiple ways including by requiring physical barriers during construction so that earthmoving equipment is not rolling over the known grave sites and by requiring that the completed construction include a significant buffer strip between that known grave area and the development’s structure(s). It could also require use, funded by the developer, of GPR and archeological monitoring to assure, as well as possible, that other burial sites on the property have not been missed.
Communications from all of us to P&Z on these points would certainly be helpful, as Hughes has requested. So that’s something we can all do locally, right now, to live out in our lives a special example of the meaning of Juneteenth by taking steps to recognize the lives of those in our community who, during their own lives, sadly lacked most measures of recognition, much as they deserved it.
Steve Hudspeth