Museum Moments: Practicing History

We Took Conneaut History to School

October was a good history month for our Conneaut Area Historical Museum and the Railroad Museums. We went to School!  At Gateway Middle School, 8^th grade teacher Jennifer Strohm spearheaded a history project for her eighth grade classes.  Using material from the Conneaut Historical Museum and the Conneaut Railroad Museum, she allowed each student to pick a Conneaut history topic to research and write about.  The eighth graders finished their papers, Jennifer finished grading them, and she is choosing excerpts from them to be published in a Jefferson Gazette story by Bob Ettinger. We will also publish them on our website.

Later in October we began taking our history stories to the Lakeshore Primary School to a different historical age group. We plan to read and tell the children Conneaut history stories one week out of every month until May.

 The October story they seemed to like best was the story of President Abraham Lincoln’s visit to Conneaut in 1860. We combined the fact that he visited here on the train with an imaginary brother and sister who went down to the railroad station to see him. Carrie, the sister, took him a birthday pie, and the story unfolds from there.

Attached are the PDFs of the October and November in school stories and the take home stories to give you an idea of what we are doing.

We Will Be on Television, Eventually!

Another exciting historical event happened on Wednesday, November 1.  A film crew from WQLN in Erie came to the Conneaut Area Historical Museum to record the story of the Marquette & Bessemer No. 2 for a segment in their Chronicles history program on Public Television.  We will let you know when it will be aired.

This is the November in school story.

This is the November take home story.

This was the October story at school.

This was the Halloween take home coloring book.