Young historians uncover their town’s Civil War connection

My goal was to get our history out there—this history that was being forgotten,” sixth-grade teacher Lise Glass Marlowe, CHEP ’89, says of her efforts to involve her students in a research project that documented their hometown’s connections to the American Civil War.

Marlowe’s efforts won national recognition for her students at Elkins Park Middle School in Cheltenham, Pa., the 2006 History Teacher of the Year award for herself from television’s The History Channel and a $5,000 grant for another student research project.

The first accolade of its type, The History Channel’s Save Our History: Teacher of the Year Award recognizes educators’ commitment to investigating and preserving their own local history. Marlowe was recognized for helping her students uncover the role their town played during the Civil War. Cheltenham, they learned, was the site of Camp William Penn, Pennsylvania’s only training camp for black Union soldiers, where 11,000 men and 11 regiments were trained. Moreover, her class produced a 65-minute film documentary, a 50-page book and a mural — all with the help of an original grant of $1,200 from a local parent foundation.

As part of her national recognition, Marlowe attended a three-day award celebration in Washington, D.C., which included special tours of the White House and national monuments. She received her award from First Lady Laura Bush along with a grant of $5,000 to use toward preserving her town’s history. With this grant, her current class of sixth-graders is creating a Holocaust documentary, interviewing local survivors, setting up resource centers in local libraries on this period in history and creating a new web site [www.history-kids.com].

Marlowe, who was nominated quietly by a peer, says the first notice she received of the award was when a representative from The History Channel called to invite her to the recognition celebration last June.

“I was shocked,” says Marlowe, who also won a similar statewide award the same year. “I had to give an acceptance speech and everything. Here I am a sixth-grade teacher one minute, and then the next minute, I am speaking in front of the first lady and other members of the government.”

A Cheltenham native, Marlowe says she, like most its residents, never knew much about the town’s historical roots, especially about Camp William Penn, which was the nation’s first and largest federal camp during the Civil War.

“Growing up, you never heard a word of these black soldiers, and here I am, teaching tolerance of diversity and history,” says Marlowe, whose classes are about 45 percent African-American students.

In addition to winning the History Channel award for their efforts, Marlowe says she also is proud that her students have been able to give their community the gift of its own forgotten history. “That was so exciting,” she says. “We met actual descendents of these soldiers in our area and began teaching them about their own ancestors.”

One of these descendents, Cicero Green, was found to be saving the May 1865 discharge papers of his great-grandfather, Cpl. Perry Hall of the 25th U.S. Colored Troops Unit stationed at Camp William Penn. The students learned that Perry Hall had an identical twin who also was enrolled in the 25th unit, and both men are buried at the national cemetery for Civil War soldiers, five minutes away from the Cheltenham camp site.

The students painted a mural that is permanently hanging in the LaMott Community Center, located a few feet from the entrance to what was once Camp William Penn. “The center was once the LaMott Elementary School before it closed in 1940,” Marlowe says.

Marlowe says even when the camp and its soldiers are mentioned in history books, the notations are inaccurate, identifying the location of the camp as Philadelphia, not Cheltenham, a suburb of the city.

Approximately 1,000 of the camp’s soldiers died, either from war wounds or diseases in the camp, Marlowe says, and many black soldiers from the camp went on to play key roles in U.S. history, including carrying Lincoln’s coffin at his funeral in Philadelphia.

“These soldiers haven’t gotten credit for what they sacrificed,” Marlowe says, adding that she is proud that their roles now are documented in several reference sources. Three Camp William Penn soldiers received the Medal of Honor for their bravery, she says.

The camp’s history is now officially in the school district’s curriculum, and her students’ book is also now part of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University, one of the largest collections of its kind at a major university.

“There’s a need for the story,” she says. “I want the students to be proud of where they came from and proud to live in Cheltenham. This is not just local and Pennsylvania history. This is national history.”

Since winning the award, Marlowe has used The History Channel’s grant money to develop a kid-friendly history web site, to set up resource centers in local libraries and to host an annual student re-enactment of the town’s historical past. Her students also learned that another teacher grew up in a historic house believed to be an Underground Railroad stop. “It was owned by William Butcher, the first African American to live in LaMott, and the town named a street in his honor,” Marlowe says.

“We are teaching the kids be the historians themselves. We have to rely on them to continue to tell the stories.”

—Laura Overturf Stetser, AS ’99