Hiking Through History

Raphael Ward Benton was born in Guilford in 1821 to Lot Benton and Hannah Chittenden. Like most early area residents, Benton had a good upbringing and came to own his own farmhouse with livestock. One pig, he recalls in a series of letters, weighed nearly 376 pounds.

"So you see," he wrote, "we don't expect to go very hungry."

This letter, penned in March of 1861 and now part of a 12-piece letter series held by The Guilford Keeping Society, could not have predicted the fateful journey Benton would take as a Civil War soldier just over one year later as part of the 14th Regiment Connecticut Volunteer Infantry (click here to read the letters on the Guilford Free Library's website).

A century and a half later, a modern-day Guilford resident is preparing to follow Benton's letters and subsequently his journey across six states and Washington, D.C. The destination, Civil War buff and Adams Middle School teacher Dennis Culliton says, is the site of "the single most bloody day in American history."

Culliton has been a teacher at Adams Middle School for just under a decade and has been using letters from Benton as a Civil War teaching tool for the past six years.

"The Civil War is so enormous," says Culliton. "There's so much written about it so when you go to teach it, it's this enormous behemoth that you can't control. What I decided to do was take a bite out of it."

But just teaching from these letters wasn't enough for Culliton. What he wanted, he said, was more of an experiential learning opportunity, and he decided to forgo lazing around on his spring break and trek to the site of the battle of Antietam starting on April 11 as way of honoring Benton and others like him.

"Our people died for liberty and freedom, so for me it's kind of a pilgrimage," said an enthusiastic Culliton.

With permission from the Guilford Keeping Society and the Guilford Free Library to use the letters in the classroom and on his journey, Culliton is planning to travel by train to Washington, D.C., and then to walk through Virginia to the Antietam battlefield in Sharpsburg, Maryland where Benton was ultimately killed.

The plan for Culliton, who was a Marine and is a longtime runner, is to exit Union station in Washington, D.C., with just a backpack and, using travel maps and routes generated by www.mapmyrun.com, hike 16 to 20 miles a day until he reaches his destination. In total he plans to hike 80.12 miles. To see his exact route, click here.

Along the way, on his one-week journey, he plans to blog daily for the Guilford Courier on www.zip06.com, offering details of the journey with photos and his own reactions (you can find his daily log, starting April 8, by visiting the Special Feature section, clicking here, or clicking in the related links to the right).

Using Benton's letters in conjunction with other materials penned by local soldiers, Culliton hopes to show people "that these wars are about us."

"It's the story of us; our own story," said Culliton, adding, "So making a national event a local story can be very important."