Walking Across Time and Memory: The History Beneath Our Feet

by Kathy Hermes

Today, we often walk with our heads down.  We’re looking at texts on our phones or – in my case – trying not to trip over our feet or a raised edge of the sidewalk.

The downward gaze may also indicate that we are looking at nothing, lost in our thoughts.  This issue invites you to look down for another reason:  the history held there.  Not “history from below,” which is a phrase historians use when looking at evidence from the perspective of ordinary people, but history on, or even below, the surface – the factory floor, the sidewalk cement that someone wrote on while it was wet, the cemetery lawn.

We also invite you to feel what it was like to move in some else’s shoes, walk by familiar places with hidden stories, or navigate streets and buildings when walking is difficult or impossible. 

I love walking Connecticut’s cities and towns.  Admittedly, I haven’t been to all of them – yet.  As a historian whose work has focused on the colonial period, I often imagine the landscape in those times.  The bones of the 1640 map of Hartford are still visible to me when I walk there today. 

The Ancient Burying Ground at Main and Gold Streets, once nearly six acres, is shrunken to a little over an acre, and the Hog River (also called the Park) is buried, but the streets mor or less run as they did then, towards the meadows north and south, around the land divisions.  The Connecticut River is now more cut off from the city than it was, but Riverfront Recapture has helped restore access.

Before colonization, the Wangunk populated the villages of Suckiog (Hartford), Pyquag (Wethersfield), Nayaug (Glastonbury), Mattabessic (Middletown), and Haddam, among others. 

In every place in Connecticut, as in Hartford, we walk across not just plots of land but across time and memory.  What do you see when you traverse your town or its woodlands and fields that might be invisible to others?  What do you remember that others may have forgotten? 

While we pause to appreciate monuments and memory, we also remember people and events with no monuments to remind us, as we reflect on the history at our feet.

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This is an excerpt from a column by publisher Kathy Hermes of Connecticut Explored that appeared in the Fall 2024 issue.  For the unedited original version, go to www.ctexplored.org.  Connecticut Explored uncovers the state’s cultural heritage with the aim of revealing connections between our past, present, and future.