“Where do you live?” seems like a simple enough question to ask a middle school or junior high student. Most of my students, when I was first teaching at Cutler, would tell me Mystic or Noank or Groton Long Point. Many seemed a little surprised to learn that all those locations were actually subdivisions of the Town of Groton.

Later at Fitch Junior High, all my students came from west of Fort Hill, including Navy housing. Some of my Navy kids hadn’t lived in Groton for very long. They had recently moved here from Charleston or Silverdale or San Diego. Others came from Hawaii or Naples or St. Marys, Georgia.

One year, the eighth grade writing prompt for the Connecticut Mastery Test was a persuasive essay. Students were asked to write to a friend who was moving and explain why he should move to the author’s town. As one boy pointed out to his teacher, he’d only lived in Groton a week. He didn’t know anything about the town!

It was then that I realized that our kids needed to actually see the town where they lived. Since the contract with the bus company at that time allowed for field trip transportation within the town limits without charge, there was no cost involved. With the blessings of the administration and the other teachers on the team, I created a route designed to show my students their town.

Before we took a tour of the town, I gave the students maps of Groton, compliments of the Town Clerk’s office. Using those maps, I traced the route we were going to be taking.

The kids were pretty good with left and right turns, but a little sketchy with east and west. Several of them discovered their neighborhoods and began to realize where they lived in relation to the school.

When the tour began, we left Fitch heading west on Route 1 and then up Buddington Road past the reservoir. With a couple of turns we were on Gungywamp Road going through Navy housing, much improved from a few years earlier.

We went down Crystal Lake Road and I commented that the ball fields on the right used to be a lake where ice was harvested for the railroad that still runs through the base.

I had the bus pause briefly on Military Highway while I pointed out the Nautilus and told the students that that vessel changed the nature of submarine warfare and had more impact on Groton than anything else in the 20th century.

We followed Military Highway to the Submarine Memorial and then up the hill to Fort Griswold. At this site the kids joined me inside the fort where I spoke a little about the battle where scores of local men gave their lives in defense of Groton.

They saw the site where Colonel Ledyard was run through with his own sword, and the plaque showing the location where British Major Montgomery was killed by Jordan Freeman, one of the heroes of the battle.

Not surprisingly for the time when the plaque was created, Freeman’s name isn’t on it.

From the fort we went down the hill to Thames Street, where I lived when I was very little, then onto Eastern Point Road. As we passed Electric Boat, where some of their parents worked (not to mention their teacher!), I told them that EB launched 74 subs during World War II, along with almost 400 PT boats.

Those shipbuilders had a large impact on the war, especially in the Pacific.

Passing Pfizer, we headed to Avery Point and the kids got to see Mr. Plant’s “summer cottage.” They learned that Mr. Plant paid for the Groton Town Hall next to our school.

From Avery Point we went up past the tree farm, where a murder had taken place, and then to AVCRAD, one of the Army’s major helicopter repair facilities. Some kids were surprised to learn that Groton had an airport.

From the airport we went back to Route 1, past Fitch and Grasso Tech, and then up to the hill to St. Mary’s, built to house the stained glass from the Vatican pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, past the police station and the high school, and then down to Marsh Road where I had the driver pull over for a moment.

I explained that Esker Point Beach, just down the road, was a public beach for all the residents of Groton. To the right they could see Groton Long Point.

Route 215 took us past Beebe Cove and into downtown Mystic, with the famous Mystic Pizza on the left. For some of the students on the bus that was the first time they’d been to Mystic. A left on Gravel Street and another left on Clift Street brought us up the hill to the site of the Pequot Massacre of 1637.

From Pequot Avenue we turned onto Sandy Hollow Road and then to Bindloss Road, where there used to be a millpond and gristmill. I played hockey on that pond when I was in junior high.

We followed River Road to Old Mystic and then back on Route 184, turning left on Flanders Road where we passed the school administration building, the LDS church and Whittle’s apple orchard.

At the end of Flanders Road we turned right, up the hill and then down the hill, arriving back at Fitch. The next day I repeated the trip with another busload of students.

Robert F. Welt of Mystic is a retired longtime teacher in Groton Public Schools.