I was young and doe-eyed when I moved to Newtown, Connecticut, in the summer of 2012. Newly married to a Newtown local, we moved into an addition on an early colonial saltbox1 off a central town road, which in southwest Connecticut is like an artery for the countless forested backroads. The main house was the kind of place that George Washington might have slept at once, the most prolific sleeper in the region if we are to believe local lore.2
My first weekend in town I volunteered for the local House and Garden tour. I didn’t really know anything about houses and even less about gardens, but the Newtown Historical Society was hosting it and I wanted to know what they were about.
Exterior of the Matthew Curtiss Jr. House, a house museum and the headquarters of the Newtown Historical Society (Wikimedia Commons).
Admittedly, I had never heard of a historical society before, but it sounded like the kind of thing someone new to New England should do—especially one interested in history. I later learned that these kinds of societies emerged during the 19th century as the endeavors of white colonial descendants interested in preserving local histories, highlighting their ancestors’ contributions to U.S. history, and fostering patriotic sentiment.3 Exactly what a daughter of Latinx immigrants fresh out of college should be getting involved in.
I met several members of the society and the larger community over my two-hour volunteer shift, and by the end of the week I was interviewed by the local newspaper, the Newtown Bee. Not long after, I received phone calls from the society’s board members. They asked me if I wanted to work for a member’s local antiquities business. Or become the organization’s Head Docent?
I was swept up in Connecticut hospitality. The leadership of the society’s all-volunteer organization included former educators, history buffs, antiquarians, retired administrators, and residents with big personalities. Their kindness prompted me to get involved. In order to do that, I would need to learn more about the town’s history, and for that there was only one person to see: Dan Cruson, who had been Newtown’s official Town Historian since 1994.
Dan Cruson. Photo provided by his son Benjamin Cruson.
A gregarious retired high school teacher with a majestic white beard and warm smile, Dan was without a doubt one of the town’s most beloved residents. He was the guest of honor at countless events, annual parades, and new business christenings; whatever it was, people wanted Dan there. This level of celebrity may seem unusual for a town historian, but seven seasons of Gilmore Girls had taught me not to question the conventions of Connecticut town life.
Once I met him, I realized why the town treasured him: he gave everyone his full attention. He was always fully engaged and genuinely interested in getting to know you. He centered the town’s history and everyone’s connection to it, and he made you feel as though you were also part of its history.4
Edmond Town Hall in Newtown (Wikimedia Commons).
I started volunteering for Dan at the Town Historian’s office, located at Edmond Town Hall on Newtown’s historic Main Street. The first day I worked at the office, I had to transcribe ledgers from an early 20th-century convent into an Excel worksheet. I was mortified when I opened the leather books to find I couldn’t read the handwriting on the fragile old paper: how would I ever get this right? Did the nuns really buy three cakes on Monday at the general store? Or that many pounds of coffee? Dan reminded me to be patient: “After a while, you’ll recognize the writer’s handwriting… see… this is an f.” It turns out the well-caffeinated nuns did indeed buy three pounds of coffee during their shopping outings, as well as multiple cakes for special occasions. This was my first lesson in patience with paleography.
As the months and years passed, Dan and I would carpool to local history events and regional society gatherings. On our trips he would point out important landmarks, from General Putnam’s Revolutionary War encampments to the lands of the indigenous Schaghticoke. He also wasn’t scared to broach the hard histories of the region, from slavery in New England to the dispossession of indigenous peoples. He was unafraid to tell young students about these histories during the district’s annual 2nd- and 4th-grade school field trips to his office.
Dan working in his Town Historian office, 2013. Photo provided by Benjamin Cruson.
When tragedy struck Newtown, as a result of the Sandy Hook shootings late in 2012, there was little solace in history. Even when the society was inundated with condolence mail from across the country, Dan himself said he did not want to memorialize the massacre. It was then that I learned sometimes the impulse to archive must wait. Sometimes you just have to mourn.
If I’m being honest, Dan was probably my best friend all those early years in Newtown. I would share my historical findings with him as well as my own interests in Middle East history. I eventually became the co-president of the historical society, a position he encouraged me to take. I told him I wanted to go to grad school, and he wrote one of my letters of recommendation. It’s likely that his letter helped me get into the graduate program for an MA in history at Yale. It was a decision that changed the trajectory of my whole life.
But I never got to tell him. Or that his training was a guiding light for me during my master’s degree and now doctoral studies in history. I learned of Dan’s passing, this past February, just when there seemed to be hope about the end of pandemic lockdowns. I had always planned to visit Newtown and surprise him in his office where we could drink lemonade and talk about the gritty details of the past. But so much had changed since we last talked, not least among them my own dissolution of marriage to the Newtown local, and every year made it more difficult to go back.
These are two of the trickiest things about being a historian: dead ends and lost traces. Our craft is often marked by unresolved remnants from our historical interlocutors. What happened to the nuns at the convent after they purchased their coffee? Did it help them in their daily lives of contemplation? Did it bring them closer to God? Dead ends to everything haunt us in the archive as in life. Dan loved talking and speculating about these lost connections, I just never thought ours would be one of them.
If he were around, I would tell him that he taught me to love the great history of small things, the provenance in the margins, the books on the back shelf. He showed me how to look for the stories that dirt could tell us, how to read between the lines of textiles, and how to look under the floorboards for evidence. He taught me, without explicitly saying so, about grounded theory and methodology. What to do when following the crumb trail only offers more questions.
Now, after five years of graduate study in history, I’ve learned there’s a generally unspoken assumption that what people like Dan do isn’t “real” history. Or that it’s just public and local history without valuable contributions to historical scholarship. That it’s unvetted or unprofessionalized, colloquial expressions of what real historians with doctorate degrees do.
But the kind of history Dan did was not out of a desire for tenure or prestige: it was a love for history itself, a drive to always learn more about it. More importantly, his approach was characterized by generosity to share this knowledge instead of gatekeeping it— where second graders to professional archaeologists could understand the importance of his work. His legacy of serving Newtown for half a century as a researcher and the official Town Historian— in addition to hundreds of published articles and several books, educating thousands of students, and making countless memories— attest to that fact.
And as for our lost connection, I’d like to think that Dan would say that history is also capable of bridging that gap. After all, what is history but a way to bond those living in the present to those who lived in the past?
Dan Cruson speaking in 2005. Photo provided by Benjamin Cruson.
- A common type of home, found in New England, typically made up of two stories in the front and one story in the back. The name comes from its resemblance to a type of wooden-lidded box that once stored salt.
- Michael Kilian, “The Truth Behind Those Places Where George Slept,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 22, 1987.
- Ruth Graham, “The Great Historic House Museum Debate,” Boston Globe, Aug. 10, 2014.
- A lifelong Nutmegger, Dan Cruson was born in New London, raised in Easton, and moved to Newtown in 1970 where he lived until 2021. He taught history, anthropology, and economics at Joel Barlow High School in Redding for 37 years and became interested in local history after he became a member of the Easton Historical Society in 1968. He published several books, including Legendary Locals of Newtown, The Slaves of Central Fairfield County, and Putnam’s Revolutionary War Winter Encampment: The History and Archaeology of Putnam Memorial State Park.