By Cecelia Hooper, Intern
The recent merging of Litchfield Public Schools and Region 6 into Region 20 has given the Litchfield Historical Society the opportunity to ensure the old district’s memory will be preserved for future generations. A generous donation by the new region of office records, sports paraphernalia, and other academic items of no longer existing schools reveal the workings of an older scholastic administration and give insight into the lives of students over the past century.
Donated student handbooks from Litchfield High School dating from the 1964-65 school year up to 1989-90 included school policies, club descriptions, possible awards, sport schedules, and the school song. Information was added and removed over the years, such as course descriptions and Title IX. Trophies show wins in baseball, basketball, and tennis, along with the names of the winning team. The trophies and sports jerseys are currently on display in the Liggett Gallery.
Office records pertaining to each student made up the majority of the donation. The earliest records date from 1909, with information on students from Litchfield High School. There are also Litchfield Elementary School records, with dates ranging from 1956-1976. There are mixed records from all the public schools with dates from all the decades in between. While each category of record has a different physical format and size, they all collect the same basic information.
They are a treasure trove of information and note a student’s family, days present, and grades, often with very different letter grades than we have today. In fact, our current system was not implemented in Litchfield until the 1950s, and use was sporadic for multiple years. Common in the first half of the twentieth century were letter grades of P, F, S, G, and VG (poor, fair, satisfactory, good, and very good), and in the very early days of the century a number system of one through ten was used.
This type of record can be invaluable for understanding how public schools worked in the past. Extensive transfer records show ease of movement between schools, though a letter from another town’s principal attached to a record shows that schools were not always equal in their rigor or expectations. Beyond just that, insight can be gleaned on what were considered acceptable absences, what subjects were taught and at what level, and what may have held a student back a grade. Wider national trends are also apparent: in the 1940s notes begin appearing on office records that a student’s information had been verified through their birth certificate.
Glimpses into the more personal life of students are also available to the canny observer. Address information is often recorded—sometimes just the name of a farm—as well as the name of a parent or parents and their occupation. One can track the highly mobile life of some students from their transfer records, though occasionally a mystery crops up: one elementary student was noted to have not returned to school after a break, vanishing when he and his father did not return from a trip.
Such a large body of information also takes up a lot of space. Filling many boxes in the archives, the records are yet to be housed in their final archival boxes. Processing such an extensive collection takes time, both to catalogue and fill out a finding aid, and to physically move the papers. There are also preservation concerns to consider: metal paper clips and staples can rust and ruin the paper, so they must be removed and replaced with archival plastic paper clips.
In total, the Litchfield Public School collection in the archives includes office records, student handbooks, class registers, yearbooks, and ephemera such as a graduation program and a valedictorian address from 1902. The dates span from 1902-2024, at all levels of public education. Some of this collection is restricted to the public in order to protect the privacy of the still living people whose information is included in the records.
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