GRAFTON — A newly published children's book by the Grafton Historical Society is being offered at a special discounted price to Vermont and New Hampshire schools this September for use in their classrooms.
The Grafton Cavaliers features the adventures and episodes of the New England college boys who formed a cavalry unit to assist the Union Army in the Civil War. It is an historical novel based on actual people, places, and events in 1862.
This will be the second book in a series of historical novels by Kurin Hattin Home School Teacher Thomas E. Fontaine. Like Fontaine's first book, The Messenger Boy of Grafton, Vermont, the new book depicts the impact of the Civil War on some of Grafton's young college students and residents.
The Grafton Cavaliers is based on the adventures of two real young men from Grafton, Samuel B. Pettengill and Wilder Luke Burnap, who volunteered for a cavalry unit for three months in the summer of 1862. It was to become the Union Army's only cavalry unit composed entirely of college students and thus was known as the “College Cavaliers.”
The unit included students from Dartmouth, Amherst, Williams, Union, Bowdoin, Middlebury, and Norwich colleges.
In the late spring of 1862, President Lincoln called for 40,000 men to volunteer to defend the city of Washington for three months as the Confederates pushed north toward Maryland.
A dedicated young junior at Dartmouth College, Sanford Burr was inspired to gather as many students as possible to form a volunteer unit of cavalry soldiers for those three months. This unit became Troop B of the 7th Squadron of the Rhode Island Cavalry. Pettengill and Burnap were two of those volunteers.
Later in 1880, Samuel Pettengill wrote and published a small book about his tour of duty with the group and his experiences fighting in the Shenandoah Valley. Author Fontaine has taken the information in that book and created a children's historical novel about those adventures. The Grafton Historical Society provided a number of original photos of the people and places in Grafton.
The book is written for readers at the sixth-grade level. It follows the decision of Sam Pettengill of Middlebury College to join the group along with his friend at Dartmouth, Wilder Burnap. It depicts their journey to Rhode Island and Washington for training and then their scouting and reconnaissance experiences in the Shenandoah Valley.
Fontaine has been a teacher for 30 years and currently is teaching at Kurin Hattin Home School in Westminster. He is an advocate of “place-based education.”
“Students need to understand the importance of their community, and learning about the place that they are part of can sometimes be an eye opener,” Fontaine says. He chose to use the historical novel to present the personalities of Sam Pettengill and Wilder Burnap as well as young men's feelings during the war and the historical facts and events surrounding them.
Fontaine's use of the historical novel in the classroom can be seen on the Grafton Historical Society website, www.graftonhistoricalsociety.org, and on Facebook by searching for “Messenger Boy of Grafton.”