Hilltop students take walking tour of Canfield

By LEE MURRAY

TheNewsOutlet.org

CANFIELD

Students from Hilltop Elementary School here took part in a walking tour of their city.

Four classes of third-grade students took part in the Tuesday morning trek, visiting several historical buildings and monuments to learn more about Canfield’s 200-year history.

Jenny Beil, a teacher at Hilltop, hopes the tour will give students a greater sense of community.

“Our lifelong goal is that they take a pride in their town, and take ownership in it,” Beil said.

Beil has been a Canfield resident for 15 years and is a member of the Canfield Historical Society. She hopes her students will remain involved and “return as teenagers and volunteer at these places and become part of the community.”

Beil said the tour was a concerted effort between Hilltop and other district schools. “We try to coordinate and do things similar to make sure our third grades get the same information,” she said.

Stops included the old courthouse, the Bond House, and the former newspaper offices and print shop at The Mahoning Dispatch. The Dispatch was Canfield’s local newspaper. It ran for 91 years between 1877 and 1968.

Canfield Historical Society owns both The Bond House and The Mahoning Dispatch building. The newspaper office is normally closed throughout the week, but it opened its doors for a few hours to show students how the presses worked. Curator Eileen Merz shared the paper’s history with the students, who huddled around as she demonstrated the antique machinery.

Merz was delighted students are being introduced to Canfield’s history at such a young age. So many adults, she said, do not know the back story of their hometown.

“How many come in here and say, ‘I’ve lived in Canfield all my life, and I’ve never even heard of this,’” she said.

The tour ended with a visit to the Canfield War Vets Museum. The students picked a name on the wall of honor and learned a piece of information about that person. At the nearby cemetery, students sought out the gravestones of Canfield’s founders.

Canfield Historical Society is running a postcard-design contest for the students.

A winner will be decided by vote next Thursday. The winner will receive a gift basket that will include gift certificates and historical postcards.

To find out more information about Canfield’s two centuries of history, visit canfieldhistory.org.

The NewsOutlet is a joint media venture by student and professional journalists and is a collaboration of Youngstown State University, WYSU Radio and The Vindicator.