Join us for a moderated conversation with Mark Edward Lender, to celebrate the release of War Without Mercy. This event is part of Avon’s America 250th Commemoration.

Drawing on vivid contemporary accounts, this is a fascinating exploration of how and why the Revolutionary War descended into a brutal existential struggle.

Please register; Zoom links will go out the day before the event.

This program is being presented as part of the Avon America 250 Celebration.

Join Connie Martin as she tells the stories passed down to her great-grandmother Lizzie of how her family survived the antebellum period through trials and tribulations, and how they used quilts that contained hidden codes and secret messages to assist abolitionists–white and black–to guide enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad to Canada. During this presentation, Connie shares eighteen different quilt patterns in replica quilts and refers to a book her mother, Dr. Clarice Boswell, wrote about their family called Lizzie’s Story: A Slave Family’s Journey to Freedom , she created and performed this family presentation for 16 years. Her words are the foundation of the presentation, and currently being made into a movie, “Freedom Code.”

Connie Martin is a retired middle school Language Arts teacher of 32 years, 35-year Aqua Fitness Master Trainer, Senior Fitness Instructor, and mother of three sons. She earned a BA from Illinois State University, and an MA from Aurora University with a Thesis in Integrating African American History in Educational Curriculums. She is an Illinois Humanities Road Scholars Speaker, 2021-2024. Martin finds joy in telling the secret codes and hidden messages used over 200 years ago by abolitionists and freedom seekers to signify escape routes to the North—and in the family quilts of her ancestors. Such shows how quilts were used to signal plans, warn of dangers, indicate how transport might occur, or who might help as “Friends” on the Underground Railroad.

Please register at www.avonctlibrary.info; Zoom links will go out before the event.

Co-sponsored by the Avon Library, Avon Historical Society, and Avon Senior Center

 A Macrobotanical Analysis at the Brian D. Jones Site in Avon, CT (tentative title), presented by Katharine Reinhart, Project  Archaeologist/Botanical Analyst, Archaeological and Historical Services, Inc, Storrs, CT. She will focus on analyzing plant evidence from the site to learn what they ate and where they found it.

This 2024 VIRTUAL HISTORY SERIES is sponsored by the Avon Historical Society, Avon Free Public Library, and Avon Senior Center in partnership with the Avon Land Trust, Farmington River Watershed Association, and the Institute of American Indian Studies in Washington, CT.

Please register and a Zoom link will be sent out before the event.

The partnership of the Avon Historical Society, Avon Free Public Library, and Avon Senior Center is pleased to present the second lecture in their fourth annual five-part webinar series “Unearthing History: The Discovery of a 12,500-year-old Paleo-Indian Site along the Farmington River in Avon, CT.”

The second lecture entitled “Bioarchaeology: Research, Ethics, and Where the Field Stands in 2024” will be presented by Alex Garcia-Putnam, PhD, University of New Hampshire, Dept of Anthropology.  It will be held on Thursday, April 11, 2024, beginning at 7:00 pm via Zoom through a link from the Library. Please register and a Zoom link will be sent out before the event.

Dr. Garcia-Putnam will present what bioarchaeology is and why it’s important to study human remains in order to understand how people lived.  The field tackles questions about ancient disease, diet, activities patterns, demography and attempts to reconstruct the identities of the individuals studied.

The fourth annual “Unearthing History” series, sponsored by a grant from the Lower Farmington River and Salmon Brook Wild and Scenic Committee, is being held in response to the 2019 excavation of a 12,500-year-old (10,000BC) Paleo-Indian site six feet below ground during a CT Department of Transportation construction project of the now completed bridge on Old Farms and Waterville Roads at Route 10 in Avon, CT.  The survey uncovered more than 18,000 artifacts and features that are characteristic of the Early and Middle Paleo-Indian periods.  The site is named for Brian D. Jones, the late Connecticut State Archaeologist, who led the effort to dig deep based on earlier excavations in the area over the past few decades. Currently, this site is the oldest archaeological site of its kind in Southern New England.

According to Dr. Lucianne Lavin of the Institute for American Indian Studies in Washington, CT, the last Ice Age in this region began to melt away about 17,500BP (Before the Present).  As it receded, a lush new land was exposed that provided for animal life to return about 13,500BP in the form of tundra-grazing animals such as mastodons, mammoths, horses, giant beaver, caribou, and more.  The ancient communities of the Paleo-Indians are thought to have begun to arrive in the northeast after that time in search of those animals for food. They were the first settlers of what is now Connecticut and southern New England.  (Connecticut’s Indigenous Peoples, by Lucianne Lavin, 2013, Yale University Press)

Partners in this series include the Farmington River Watershed Association, Institute of American Indian Studies, Washington, CT and The Avon Land Trust.   The third webinar entitled “Foraging in the Paleoindian Period: A Macrobotanical Analysis” will be held on Thursday, May 9 at 7:00pm.  It will be presented by Katharine Reinhart, Project Archaeologist/Botanical Analyst, Archaeological and Historical Services, Inc.

To watch the webinars from the 2021, 2022 and 2023 series on YouTube, visit:  www.youtube.com/user/afplct

Please register and a Zoom link will be sent out before the event.

The History of Native American Archaeology in Connecticut will be presented by Nicholas Bellantoni, emeritus state archaeologist with the UCONN State Museum of Natural History and adjunct associate research professor in the Department of Anthropology. He will take the audience through the history of archaeology in CT, bringing it up to the present day with discoveries and the process during the work at the Brian D. Jones Site.

The 2024 VIRTUAL HISTORY SERIES is sponsored by the Avon Historical Society, Avon Free Public Library and Avon Senior Center, in partnership with the Avon Land Trust, Farmington River Watershed Association, and the Institute of American Indian Studies in Washington, CT.

Click here to watch this presentation on YouTube. 

Enhance your knowledge about Dutch contributions to our Connecticut heritage: few people know that the first documented European to visit Connecticut was the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block in 1611, and that the first European settlers in Connecticut were the Dutch at Saybrook Point in 1623. (A Dutch trading post had been erected there even earlier, around 1614-1616.)

The Dutch Colony of New Netherland extended well beyond the Hudson River Valley, westward into present day New Jersey and Delaware and eastward to Cape Cod in Massachusetts. New Netherland was not just a loose linking of Dutch trading posts. Dutch colonists founded towns and villages along Long Island Sound, the mid-Atlantic coast, and up the Connecticut, Hudson, and Delaware River valleys. Their daily routines brought them into frequent contact with their Native American neighbors. Although altercations did occur, in general the relationships resulted in a Dutch-Indigenous interdependence that enhanced living standards and promoted goodwill within both communities.

 

The purpose of this PowerPoint presentation is to introduce its audience to the significant impact of Dutch traders AND settlers on our history, including the continuing strong Dutch presence in western Connecticut, Dutch relationships with local Indigenous communities, and the noteworthy, often long-term effects of those relationships on our heritage. The Dutch deserve a more prominent position in Connecticut history books and museum exhibits. Dutch-American history and Dutch contributions to American culture should be mandated topics in Connecticut’s school curriculum. These were the main reasons for the publication of my edited volume Dutch and Indigenous Communities in Seventeenth Century Northeastern North America: What Archaeology, History, and Indigenous Oral Traditions Teach Us about their Intercultural Relationships (2021, Albany: State University of New York Press).

 

Lucianne Lavin is Director Emerita of Research and Collections at the Institute for American Indian Studies (a museum and research and educational center in Washington, Connecticut), a position she held for 18 years. She has over 50 years of research and field experience in Northeastern archaeology and anthropology, including teaching, museum exhibits and curatorial work, cultural resource management, editorial work, and public relations. Dr. Lavin is a founding member of Connecticut’s Native American Heritage Advisory Council (a government agency whose appointed members advise the Office of State Archaeology and the State Historic Preservation Office on Native American burials and sacred sites), and retired editor of the journal of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut, a position she held for 30 years.

An update on the Brain D. Jones site in Avon since its discovery in 2019 will be presented by Eric Heffter, Senior Prehistoric Archaeologist, Archaeological and Historical Services, Storrs, CT.

October is Archaeology month in Connecticut, perfect timing for this update and time allotted for questions and answers.

Review the recording on YouTube here. 

 

Paleoindian Sites, Site Patterning, and Travel Corridors Along the Southern Arm of the Champlain Sea will be presented by Jess Robinson, Vermont State Archeologist, Vermont Archaeology Heritage Center, Barre, VT.

He will compare and contrast Paleo sites in Vermont with the Brain D. Jones site in Avon.

View the recording on YouTube here.

The Big Importance of Small Things: Microscopic and Blood Residue Analysis of Ancient Stone Tools will be presented by Heather M. Rockwell, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Cultural and Historic Preservation, Noreen Stonor Drexel Cultural and Historic Preservation Program.

She assisted in helping discover the blood protein of mammals on some of the tools discovered in the Brain D. Jones site.

View the recording on Youtube here. 

Hunting and fishing techniques of the Paleoindians will be presented by Richard Boisvert, retired New Hampshire State Archeologist.

Dr. Boisevert is very familiar with the discovery and analysis of the Brain D. Jones site and other Paleoindian sites in northern New England.

View the recording on YouTube here.