VOLUME 22/NUMBER 3/SUMMER 2024       Connecticut Explored

By Julie Thompson

In the fall of 2019, there were rumblings of a deadly virus that was making its way across the world. Then, March 2020 arrived, and the world stopped. Schools, businesses, restaurants, and stores closed, leaving most people at home wondering what each day would bring. At the Historical Society of Glastonbury, the museum doors stayed locked. We tasked our newly hired director with looking for grants or sources of income to help our small nonprofit maintain our historical properties when we knew we could not hold events or welcome guests for the foreseeable future.

Glastonbury High School’s class of 2020 experienced a socially distanced graduation ceremony on June 4, 2020.

On May 26, 2020, The New York Times documented the efforts of museums to collect local stories about how people experienced the COVID-19 pandemic. Adam Popescu’s “Recipes, Doodles, Face Masks: Curators Begin Culling History” reported that museums were “not just seeking artists’ work, but everyone’s memories—the more personal, the better—in an effort that recalls the repositories of first-person testimony, along with material evidence or historical records, gathered by cultural institutions after September 11.” Glastonbury began asking the same questions about how to document and preserve residents’ experiences, thoughts, feelings, and daily life at this historic moment in time. We wanted to ensure that future visitors to our museum could try to understand how the people of Glastonbury navigated their COVID-19 experiences with their family, friends, and community.

Between 1918 and 1920, a flu pandemic devastated the globe, but, as Scott Hershberger notes in “The 1918 Flu Faded in Our Collective Memory: We Might ‘Forget’ the Coronavirus, Too” (Scientific American, August 13, 2020), there remain eerily few sources about it. In Glastonbury, our collection includes little about the flu pandemic, even though it killed tens of millions of people. Hershberger offered an explanation from Guy Beiner at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev: “We have an illusion. We believe that if an event is historically significant—if it affects many, many people . . . —then it will inevitably be remembered. That’s not at all how it works.” The museum did not want to repeat its dearth of sources for the COVID pandemic. So, we created a dedicated email address and asked for submissions from Glastonbury residents.

Glastonbury High School graduation bus, 2020.

Our COVID-19 project requested stories, photographs, art, poetry, or statements about daily life, joys, frustrations, holidays, and birthday celebrations. We only received five submissions, including photos of a unique school project created at home in which the artist chose to construct a cardboard replica of their house with each family member depicted in cardboard studying, working, or watching TV in the different rooms of the home; photos of Glastonbury High School’s 2020 graduation in which a caravan of vehicles with teachers and administrators stopped at each of the 500 graduating seniors’ driveways to present their diplomas in person; and photos of life around town. The submissions were welcome. Still, there were not as many as we had hoped.

The primary purpose of a historical museum, especially a small local museum such as ours, is to document and memorialize a particular

Glastonbury’s Hebron Avenue School celebrated “Healthcare Heroes” and graduates of Glastonbury High School, June 25, 2020. photos: The Historical Society of Glastonbary

period’s historical events and life experiences. In our exhibits, we use diaries, store ledgers, medical records, and everyday items such as clothing, dishes, or embroidered samplers to help us tell the story of the lives of the people of Glastonbury. As cited by Popescu, David Kennedy, a Stanford University historian, noted, “A successful museum . . . should provide context and enable future visitors to understand the tenor and temper of the times.”

In the spring of 2021, we again solicited submissions from residents. We asked residents to give us one memory of a COVID interaction that made a difference in their lives or to tell us something good that came from the pandemic isolation. We took inspiration from another museum and asked people to take a photo of ten things they could not have lived without during COVID-19. Still, very few people contributed. It was frustrating but not unexpected after the first effort. Upon reflection, we thought that perhaps the pandemic was something people wanted to survive and “get through” but not necessarily to reminisce about or remember.

Glastonbury Historical Society

We are, however, grateful to those who participated. We have a poem, an email about a husband scouring stores for a much-appreciated Mother’s Day gift of Charmin and hand sanitizer, and many, many photos of holiday humor, funny stickers on floors asking people to remain six feet apart, Zoom meeting screens, signs at parks asking people not to congregate, and ice cream delivery trucks bringing treats to neighborhoods. We still need more recollections and memories from Glastonbury residents. Our email address—hsgcovid19project@gmail.com—remains active, and we hope there will be more people willing to contribute to our record of the COVID-19 pandemic and our experiences during that time.

Julie Thompson is the president of the Historical Society of Glastonbury.