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Students Bring Columbus’ Past to the Streets and the Graveyard
columbus pilgrimage, culture, friendship cemetery, historic blocks of columbus, history, jonathan mims, mississippi school for mathematics and science,
For many high school history students, names and dates never make it outside the classroom. They’re dutifully forgotten as soon as the bell rings.
Not so at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science. Students of American history hold class – both together and on their own time – at the library, in the courthouse, around historic downtown and even inside the local cemetery after dark.
The school puts on theatrical tours of both the historic downtown district and the local cemetery during the annual Columbus Pilgrimage. Students spend hours conducting primary source research on the town’s historic characters – from heroes to average Joes – and turn their findings into performances complete with period costumes.
The graveyard history lesson, a program called “Tales From the Crypt,” invites Columbus residents and their guests to hear the stories of men and women buried in Friendship Cemetery. Students don the costumes and the personas of Confederate generals, former Mississippi governors, lawmakers, businessmen and many other souls who have passed to illuminate the lives of those that shaped Columbus’s history.
“Historic Blocks of Columbus” is a yearlong project undertaken by the MSMS 11th-grade American history students to unearth the stories of the town’s former citizens. Every student is assigned to a block in the historic downtown district, and court records, newspaper clippings and aged correspondence become textbooks for piecing together the story of that block’s residents between 1870 and 1934. Students work together to write a script for their block and guide tours in character as townsfolk of a bygone day.
“There is no one single ‘story’ in history,” says Julie Heintz, a history teacher at MSMS. “Instead, the combined experiences of people across time have come together to form the foundation of present American society. By learning about a particular block and time period of a city’s history, students can immerse themselves into the lives, stories and events of the people of Columbus.”
The program, which was a national finalist in the History Channel’s 2006 Save Our History competition, teaches students living history along with unconventional research and presentation skills.
“Digging through records at the courthouse and the library taught me how to do real research without the ‘help’ of the Internet. Microfilm is a breeze now!” says student Sarah Prather. “Also, I came to realize that the subjects were real people who lived, worked and had dreams just like us, so turning the research into a dramatic script was especially fun for me.
“Having people approach me after the performance and say stuff like, ‘William W. Humphries was my great-grandfather,’ felt great, too. Comments like that let me know that I had helped people to reconnect with their past.”
Story by Michaela Jackson
