Witness Stones: 2026 Project Description

By Arden Boms ’28

This year, the seventh graders participated in the Witness Stones Project. The Witness Stones Project is a search into Connecticut' s dark history to reveal the hard truths of our country. We aim to shine a light on an injustice that was erased over time. Dennis Culliton started the project in 2017 as a way to humanize the lives of people who were not treated the right way while they lived. This year, we studied a man named Sharper Rogers.

We started the unit by learning about the time period. We read the following books: Venture Smith’s Colonial Connecticut, To Be a Slave by Julius Lester, and The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, as a graphic memoir. We highlighted each book based on the five themes of slavery:

• Dehumanization
• Enslaved as property
• Economics of Slavery
• Agency and resistance
• Paternalism

We wrote poems from our reading, some of which you will hear today. We watched the story of Harriet Tubman and took notes on her life and the setting in which she lived. We read about black soldiers fighting in the Revolutionary War and how they were treated unfairly because of the color of their skin. We learned about the Fugitive Slave Act, the two for one soldier exchange, the ⅗ tax law, and the Gradual Emancipation Act. We learned about the pain slavery brought to families and the pain it still brings. As Julius Lester wrote, “They were people, their condition was slavery.”

We then started learning about Sharper Rogers. We focused on Roger’s life as an enslaved man, free man, soldier, husband, and father. We pieced together his life based on primary documents. What we didn’t know, we used historical context and inferences to fill in. Joy Burns and Liz Lightfoot came into school to answer our many questions, and we were very thankful. We designed infographics in small groups, each on a different topic. We wrote a biographical sketch about Sharper’s life.

There were very few documents about Sharper Rogers, which made completing the Witness Stones Project hard. We only had attendance records from his service, a marriage document, a book where his regiment was mentioned, and a manumission that may or may not have been about the same Sharper Rogers. It was an obstacle in our learning, but we persevered.

The most helpful item we had was the historical context. We didn’t always know exactly what happened to Sharper, but with historical context, we could assume a likely scenario. For example, we didn’t know why Rogers was in the hospital. We did know that a smallpox epidemic was occurring and that many soldiers had the virus. These historical facts filled the holes in Sharper’s story. We told his story to our best ability with what information we had.

At the ceremony, we welcomed Pat Wilson Pheanious, the Director of Stopping Stones, which is a part of Historic New England, and an ancestor to Cesar Rogers. Sharper Rogers was most likely Cesar’s father, so that makes Pat a direct descendant of Sharper. This is special and unique because we have the opportunity to share Sharper’s story with her. 

We gather at the 2026 Witness Stones Ceremony to humanize the life of Sharper Rogers, a man who fought for a country that only recognized him as ⅗ of a person. This country tried to erase his story, but we remember his life and the stamp he, and all black soldiers, left on Connecticut.