While the coronavirus spread across the world, the nation, and the state, the nightly news also reported on community spirit spreading across neighborhoods to counter the accumulating cases and the accompanying anxiety. As the tragic news grew and drove us physically further apart, people discovered new ways to connect despite the mandatory distancing. We watched Italian neighbors singing with one another from their balconies, neighbors in Brooklyn, New York dancing on the sidewalks while one of them supplied music, and in Willimantic, a gentleman serenading his neighborhood nightly with bagpipes, all with the mutual goal of unifying and uplifting ourselves. Here in Hampton, where we have neither balconies, nor sidewalks, nor, apparently, bagpipes, past and present members of our community “gathered” around a social media page: Hampton Remembers the 2nd Half of the 20th Century.
John Osborn, who grew up in Hampton during the “golden era” remembered for the many children who lived and played here, started the group last year. For several months, a handful of people participated with memories and photographs. But membership swiftly grew shortly after resident Kathy Thompson posted a thirty minute montage of Memorial Day parades and other celebrations filmed by Fred Curry over several years. With the imposed isolation and a yearning for connections, over 400 current and former residents started to contribute recollections to the page that has proved “a lovely diversion”, and serves as sort of a virtual sequel to “Hampton Remembers, a Small Town in New England, 1885-1950”, the book Alison Davis published in 1976, a collection of interviews she recorded of residents who were born and raised here. Granted, our time in the last half of the last century was not as exciting our grandparents’, who witnessed electricity, automobiles, telephones, refrigeration, indoor plumbing, and gasoline operated machines come to Hampton. But our years here have meant everything to us.
Over the course of several weeks, people from across the country and as far away as Spain have posted pictures of graduations, weddings, birthdays, proms. Old homesteads, railroad stations, the General Store, Little River Grange, one room school houses, and the students who attended them. Newspaper clippings of celebrations and commendations, film clips of games played on Lenny’s Field when everyone and their father played baseball, parades on Main Street when no one would ever dream of missing them, parishioners pouring from the church on Easter Sunday wearing the hats and the coats and the gloves purchased for the occasion.
Accompanying commentary has solved mysteries, identified people and places, recounted folktales, stirred long forgotten memories, explained rural legends, extended family trees. We’ve been able to visit our friends and revisit our families here, our departed grandparents, and parents, with people remembering them with dear, dear memories.
Contributors have written brief biographies through the lens of their connections to Hampton. People whose roots are here, whose ancestors’ roots are here, people who discovered roots here, set down roots here, and people who were here briefly, yet still call this place “home”. As John Osborn wrote, “It doesn’t matter that we are spread out across the country. We still see ourselves as neighbors.”
Everyone is welcome to join Hampton Remembers the 2nd Half of the 20th Century. And a new edition of Alison Davis’ original “Hampton Remembers” is available by contacting markmdavis@yahoo.com.