Zachary Bodnar, a rising senior at The Gunnery, has been named the Gunn Scholar for 2010-2011. The program, in its ninth year, chooses one four-year senior to pursue a year-long project of original historical research based on the contents of the school’s archives. A review panel of faculty chooses the recipient from study proposals submitted by the students in the spring of their junior year.
Zack will pursue a well-developed passion for history and particularly for military history through the Civil War letters of soldiers from The Gunnery and the town of Washington. His project is particularly pertinent as the United States begins to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War in April 2011, which is the occasion of the firing on Fort Sumter. Zack has already toured battlefields in Virginia and Pennsylvania and hopes to work with Dr. Walter Powell who edited a seminal book about Connecticut soldiers in the Civil War. Among other stories, he will pursue the presentation of a sword to Leonard Van Cott by his grateful schoolmaster and fellow pupils and the process Charles Goodyear followed to become the leader of a black regiment. In addition to the contents of The Gunnery’s archive, Zack will look the Litchfield Enquirer on microfiche at the Litchfield Historical Society, the journals of Jerome Titus at The Gunn Museum, and the award winning project of the Shepaug Valley Middle School with Abner Mitchell’s letters as well as countless others.
Zack’s project follows the pioneer project of Samantha Collum ’03 of Washington CT, who studied the love letters of Frederick and Abigail Gunn; of Mark Rhoads ’04, who studied the circumstances of an 1869 baseball photograph, Caleb Elston ’05, who studied the architecture and interior design of the Bourne administration building, Kyley Cheever '06, who studied Mr. Gunn's teaching methods and recreated a 19th-century school day, Alyse Dufour '07 who studied the photography of William H. Gibson, Class of 1866 and his relationship to the natural environment in Washington, Sara Silverman ‘08 who studied Mr. Gunn’s role in the origins of recreational camping, Ross Anderson ’09 who studied the development of Mr. Gunn’s abolitionist conscience, and Jason Boileau who studied the architectural vision of Ehrick Rossiter, Class of 1870.