The Project

In 2021, this project set out to research the lives of Black people enslaved by the Chaffee, Loomis, and Hayden families as well as the historical contexts in which they lived. For its first four years, our committed and collaborative student-faculty research project sought to center the lives of people whose lives were forever altered by the experiences of enslavement. The project expanded in 2025 with the addition of Indigenous Perspectives, research that aspires to tell the history of the Loomis Chaffee campus through Indigenous histories and perspectives. With a new name, Loomis Chaffee Ethical History Project, we look forward to both deepening and broadening the focus of our ongoing work. 

With research in online archival collections of public and private records, archives, object collections, and libraries in Connecticut and South Carolina, and many other scholarly sources in print and digital media, including the inspirational and seminal work of Marisa Fuentes, this project seeks to tell new stories about these enslaved persons’ experiences and to craft narratives that, despite these investigations, remain frustratingly uneven and incomplete. 

By investigating the lives of Black people enslaved by the Chaffee, Loomis, and Hayden families as well as the historical contexts in which they lived, we have sought to understand how their lives could shape longer narratives about the history of The Loomis Chaffee School as well as contemporary circumstances of the school community. As a member of the University of Virginia’s Universities Studying Slavery consortium, we believe that an equitable school must seek a fuller understanding of itself and its origins, and, in so doing, should inspire community members to learn more and to take action. 

The renaming of Mason Dormitory in 2017 by the Loomis Chaffee Board of Trustees was an important precursor to this project. In many ways, the student/faculty co-facilitated research model began in 2016 with a report investigating Captain John Mason’s role in the early history of Connecticut and its legacy.

Importantly, as we continue to learn more about the historical narratives of enslavement and the Indigenous groups unseated by colonizers in the 1630s on the land upon which the campus sits today, the production of historical knowledge about slavery and Indigeneity, and the ethics of using archives and sources shaped predominantly by the perspectives of enslavers and colonizers, we find ourselves asking as many questions as we are able to answer. We are mindful of the many ways this work will continue to generate new inquiry and, for this reason, remain both an inspiration and unfinished.

Student and faculty researchers alike have found this work to be equal parts frustrating and rewarding.  We feel strongly that our school community benefits from continued efforts to uncover important truths about these histories and our relationships with them. We remain grateful for the opportunity to engage in this project.