The Statue on the Green

The Hartford photographer William G. Dudley took this photograph of a Civil War monument on the town green in Glastonbury shortly after it was erected to commemorate Frederick M. Barber and other Glastonbury men killed in the Civil War. Barber, a captain with the 16th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry, died on September 20, 1862 of wounds received in action at the Battle of Antietam. His widow Mercy dedicated the monument in 1913, more than fifty years after her husband’s death. Mrs. Barber lived for four more years and died in 1917 at the age of eighty-seven. This summer, Jay LIchtmann, a volunteer at the Connecticut Historical Society, scanned over 1000 of Dudley’s original glass negatives, and Sasha Agins, a student from Bryn Mawr, finished formatting and finishing online records begun a decade ago by yet another dedicated volunteer, Norm Hausman. It was Agins who identified the monument in the photograph and determined its location.

 

A Big Thank You!

Thanks! I cannot say this word enough to the handful of high-school and college volunteers that dutifully come in at least one Saturday of every month, giving up valuable weekend mornings that could be spent working additional hours at a paying job, hanging out with friends, or sleeping. Instead, my volunteers can be found engaging in conversations about history with visitors from ages 2 – 102, cleaning up spilled glitter from an arts and craft project, or sitting down in our reproduction colonial kitchen, wearing an apron and pretending to enjoy the onion and apple soup that is being prepared for them by one of our young visitors.