A bunch of Deer Isle teenagers are having the time of their lives, traveling here and abroad, meeting fascinating people, and learning at the same time thanks to a teacher’s idea and the Island Institute’s CREST project.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, CREST stands for “Community for Rural Education, Stewardship and Technology,” and includes eleven coastal and island middle and island high schools.
Three Deer Isle-Stonington High School teachers, Thomas Duym, Kimberley Larsen and Elizabeth Small, volunteered along with seven students. The seven named themselves BRIDGE, an acronym for Better Resources for Island Development and Growth for Everyone.
While brainstorming ideas for CREST projects, Duym realized that CREST would be perfect for a project he had longed to take up since 2001, when he started teaching on the island. This was an idea dear to the heart of a man who grew up in a household that thought more of sailing and the America’s Cup than of football and the Superbowl. His dream was to research the genealogy of descendents of “the Deer Isle Boys,” the local fishermen who made up the entire crews of yachts that won two America’s Cups back in the 1890s.
The students and teachers agreed with Duym, and chose researching “the Deer Isle Boys,” finding their descendents, and making their results available to the public one of their four CREST projects. (The other three are mapping trends in property ownership and land-use changes over time, creating geographic information systems data to depict lobster habitat characteristics in conjunction with the Stonington lobster hatchery, and researching and making a model of tidal mills for an exhibit at the island’s historical society.)
Hope Rowan and Ruth Kermish-Allen of the Island Institute help teachers and students use the CREST project’s three parts. They use ethnography to get firsthand accounts and observations using digital camera, camcorders, and voice recorders. They use geographic information systems to relate information to place by arranging, displaying and analyzing relevant information. They learn and use Web design to give them experience in digital communication. In this part of the project, students also learn how to create a personalized web site.
The “Deer Isle Boys”
Every Islander knows about and is proud of those fishermen who fished by sail so long ago, racing each other into the harbor at the end of the day. Not only did that racing eventually turn into today’s lobsterboat races, but some wealthy yachtsmen, while visiting the harbor from the New York Yacht Club and looking for crews to hire for the America’s Cup, noticed island fishermen racing home each afternoon and realized what they were seeing. C. Oliver Iselin, a member of the syndicate that owned four America’s Cup vessels, including Defender and Columbia, came to Deer Isle village’s Pilgrim’s Inn, then called The Ark, back in the 1890s to help choose the island’s best sailors for those winning crews.
Reading off their names is like reading the Deer Isle, Stonington and Isle au Haut phone books: Barbour, Barter, Billings, Bray, Conant, Conary, Eaton, Ellis, Fifield, Gray, Green, Greenlaw, Gross, Hall, Hamblen, Hardy, Haskell, Joyce, Marshall, Robbins, Scott, Small, Staples, Stinson, Thompson, Wood, and Young. Sixty-six Deer Isle fishermen made the first cut. Fourteen eventually crewed on both winning vessels.
The Deer Isle Boys turned out to be a popular subject. One student and CREST team member, Alison Turner, is not only descended from Charles Scott, who crewed on both winning vessels, but her family has quite a few of Scott’s America’s Cup artifacts.
As the students explored family forebears, they became interested in the America’s Cup itself. Late in 2006, they sought out (via the Internet) BMW Oracle, the US team’s contender for the 2007 race, and asked for information. In January 2007, the Oracle team responded. When they found out what the Deer Isle kids were doing, they invited the students to visit them in Spain, where they were training for the America’s Cup to be held in May. If the students could get there, they wrote, they’d set up interviews with the crew and vessel owners, and show them around.
With such an invitation, the CREST team figured, why not try? Students and teachers made some phone calls, put together a mailing list of island summer and year-round residents, realizing it was a long shot, Duym said, and sent our 60 letters. To their amazement, they raised almost $20,000 in four weeks. Duym said, “Better than 50 percent came from one person who summers there with roots in the island.” This financial angel, related to one of the Deer Isle Boys himself and interested in the America’s Cup, called and pledged a significant amount: enough to get the team to Spain and back. Duym said, “We invited him to go with us. He and his son went on the trip with us, met us at Kennedy, and spent four or five days with us.” He said of the angel, “He’s been a huge supporter of the project and the kids.”
When the rest of the high school students learned the CREST group had made a trip to Spain to see the America’s Cup and planned a trip in the fall to the New York Yacht Club (WWF Dec-Jan 2007-08) the Vanderbilt mansion in Newport, and Mystic Seaport and the Herreshoff Museum as part of their research, the number interested leapfrogged to 19. At Mystic, students got to see the compass binnacle from DEFENDER and the ship’s wheel from COLUMBIA, where they had a group photo taken. Duym said they felt “the ghost of the Deer Isle Boys steering us down this path.” He said that Mystic had genealogical information that related to Alison Turner through the Charles Scott family. “[Scott] sailed on both,” he said. “They had information she didn’t have and she had information they didn’t. They exchanged.”
Duym noted that until World War II, crews were paid professional sailors and said, “The Deer Isle Boys were paid to sail: $40 or $45/month at a time when lobster went for five or ten cents apiece.” Deer Isle-Stonington Historical Society’s Tinker Crouch said, “Hundreds of fishermen went yachting in summer, then came home to the island and fished in winter.”
Public Television
By this time, WGBH-TV, Boston’s Public Television station, had taken an interest in the CREST students and what they were doing, and chose, along with five other schools and projects, the Deer Isle-Stonington High School kids and sent a film crew to catch them as they did their research.
The film crew spent two days in early May filming the students. Small said, “They filmed a normal day in class, Alison Turner walking her family’s land, Tegan McGuire handing her brochure to Lou Cooper at the Little Deer Isle information kiosk.” The film crew also filmed students at the Kings Row cemetery, where they have located 12 headstones, and at the Deer Isle-Stonington Historical Society as the students did what Rowan described as “Place-based education: using education in the local community and environment.” Small also helped students map sites of crewmembers in the cemetery Duym added, “The Historical Society research has been mostly run by Kim Larsen.”
“We’re slowly finding grave sites,” Duym said. “If we get permission from the families, we hope to be able to attach some kind of emblem of metal to the gravestones. We have metal casting capability at the school. With a map of the grave sites, this would make it possible for people to walk through the cemeteries and identify the Deer Isle Boys.”
“Going to the New York Yacht Club was a neat capstone to the fall trip,” Duym said. “We came back with a ton of information. We’re still assimilating it. The goal is to keep it going for two more semesters and by the end of next year, to publish a book on the Deer Isle Boys.”
The CREST students and teachers are making a permanent contribution to their island. You can’t ask more of education than that.
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