During the summer of 2021, faculty and students researchers split into two groups. Because we were spread across the globe from Connecticut to New York, South Carolina, Georgia, and Nigeria, and because of lingering concerns about travel during the COVID-19 pandemic, our research work and meetings took place entirely online. One group gathered information for the timeline, and the second group dove into the research and writing for the narratives of the named and known people enslaved by the Loomis, Hayden, and/or Chaffee families. After a couple weeks of working in the groups, the students switched groups, providing fresh eyes on the research. Thus, gaps and additional information were filled in for the timeline, while the second group worked on drafting narratives for the remaining identified enslaved persons. Finally, both groups merged regularly to share information, questions, insights, and mysteries. The biographies can be found here and the timeline can be found here.
Even after the conclusion of our first summer of research, we had lingering questions about Hayden, Loomis, and Chaffee families’ involvement in slavery and enslaved people’s lives. And, yet, as Marisa Fuentes has written in Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, we must investigate “our own desires as historical scholars to recover what might never be recoverable and to allow for uncertainty, unresolvable narratives, and contradictions.”
After a presentation to the Board of Trustees in the spring of 2022 and after the graduation of our inaugural student researchers–all members of the Class of 2022–a new group of rising seniors joined the project. Three of these students joined three teachers in Charleston, South Carolina, where we conducted five days of archival research and site visits. In collaborative writing sessions held around a dining room table in Charleston and in virtual spaces after our return to Connecticut, the team has processed research findings from the trip. This work is ongoing.
We have now turned toward the work of spreading word about the project and exploring how our findings might be brought into the story of our school and of ourselves. Eric LaForest represented Loomis Chaffee at the University of Virginia’s Universities Studying Slavery 2022 fall conference.