Kids chronicle town’s history

Anyone looking for a cute Christmas gift need go no farther than Bridgeside Books or the town library for a copy of “Walking Through Waterbury: Small Town, Big History.”

The historical look at the town’s architecture was “written by kids for kids,” said MK Monley, art teacher at Thatcher Brook Primary School.

The book was published a month ago by the Susan Sebastian Foundation Inc., and has already raised more than $500 for the Waterbury Historical Society, with suggested donations of $5 to $10 per copy.

Students in third and fourth grades at the school profiled 18 historic buildings in town, including the first frame house built by settler Ezra Butler.

Other historic buildings described in print and illustrated with pastel drawings include the James Building, the town’s first brick structure, at Stowe and Main streets; the train station; Wesley United Methodist Church, and the Old Stagecoach Inn, built in 1826.

Last spring, third- and fourth-graders leveraged expertise from the town historical society to research the early 19th-century buildings in town, reaching deep into an era that lacked not only winter snowplows but wifi too.

The students walked through town to photograph historic buildings for art class with Monley, and later interviewed historians as part of their literacy training in school.

“They wrote the words and made the art, and decided on a format and title,” Monley told the Record.

The project began a couple of years ago when Elise Braun, a Waterbury resident, approached Monley about producing a children’s book for the Sebastian Foundation. Braun established the nonprofit in 2009 to honor the wishes of her late daughter, who languished during a long illness, often staring at empty and anodyne hospital walls.

“When I get out of here, I am going to sell my house to buy art for hospital patient rooms,” Susan Braun had told her mother.

Now, the foundation not only provides art to beautify medical settings throughout Vermont, but publishes books about art, too.

After printing a similar historical look at Burlington’s Old North End, Braun saw an opportunity to document Waterbury’s own architectural history, its classic streetscape dominated still by the Victorian age.