Clad in their sky blue “Hike Through History 2026” t-shirts, throngs of Central School students, teachers, and parents trekked through downtown last Friday to learn about daily life for citizens in the late 1800s.
During the four-hour hike, kindergarten through second grade students walked with classmates to 18 stops where they were treated to a mix of games, snacks, and short skits about an aspect of South Berwick’s history.
Each stop focused on the lives of everyday people, including bakers, servants, sea captain, ice delivery men, and mill workers. As in past years, rather than teachers taking the lead at each location, Central School third graders teamed up with older student over the course of several weeks to plan each stop and lead the activities.
This year, Marshwood High School sophomores from three different social studies classes worked with the 8- and 9-year-olds to plan and run the hike’s stops.
Since it began in the early 1990s, the Hike Through History has been a tradition unique to South Berwick.
“Years ago, back when we were writing the content for Hike Through History, we wrote a couple grants and during our research we could not find any similar programs in the world,” said Nicole St. Pierre, president of the Old Berwick Historical Society, which teams up with the schools every year to run the event.
At one location Friday, about 15 first graders sat cross-legged on a side porch of the historic Stage House Inn, passing around photos of old stagecoaches as three high schoolers and three third graders stood in front describing the hardships of travel in the late 1800s.
Not only were the roads 150 years ago pocked with holes and rocks, the first graders learned, but the seats usually had no cushions, there was no music or air-conditioning, and the horse-drawn coaches were slow and prone to getting stuck in ditches and mud.
The rapt audience peppered the presenters with questions: How fast did the stagecoach go? What if they couldn’t get the wagon out of the ditch? Where would they stop to rest? What if they couldn’t find a tavern?
“Would you guys want to sit in a bumpy wagon for days and days to get where you are going?” one of the high school students asked. The response was a chorus of “Nooooo’s.”
At the sea captain stop on the lawn of the Sarah Orne Jewett House, students learned about maritime trade, experienced a simulated turbulent storm underneath a shaking parachute, and ate orange slices to stave off scurvy.
At other stops, the youngsters kneaded bread dough, hauled blocks of ice on wagons in a spirited relay race, learned how to launder sheets on an old washboard, picked and carded cotton fibers, and learned how mill workers changed the bobbins on a loom.
This year’s hike was the first time since 2010 that high school students, rather than middle school students, helped lead the program with the third graders.
For many of the older students, being involved again after so many years evoked a strong sense of nostalgia for when they were the wide-eyed youngsters hiking through town.
“I just remember Hike Through History being such a magical time when we were younger, everybody loved it,” said Kyla Leighton, a sophomore helping lead the sea captain stop at the Jewett House. “Just being back here again in this backyard makes me super nostalgic just remembering so many years doing this hike; so many different activities and snacks and learning about the house.”
Although the day is ostensibly about teaching local history, the extensive planning and cooperation between students of different ages adds an element that goes far beyond classroom learning, St. Pierre said. As a former eighth-grade social studies and language arts teacher at what is now Great Works School, she has often witnessed a transformation in students during the weeks planning the event.
“There are always those kids where the classroom is not always where they perform best or feel most comfortable, but every year there are the kids like that who shine like crazy during the hike,” she said. “You can see their confidence grow and blossom through the day. Sometimes it’s the ones who didn’t even want to do it at first who are the ones keeping the whole stop together.”
Megan Zottoli-Breen, a third-grade teacher who was one of the main organizers of the hike this year, said planning the hike has become a rite of passage each spring for the third graders about to matriculate out of Central School.
“You see a lot of the kids come into third grade so excited about being student leaders and working with the older kids to plan the hike,” Zottoli-Breen said. “Collaborating with the high schoolers can be a little humbling for them at first, but through the whole event you see their confidence build as they rise to the occasion throughout the school year.”
The high schoolers, too, say that working with the third-graders to plan the hike added an energy and younger perspective that greatly strengthened the whole program.
“They helped help us so much finding ways to relate better to the little kids we were presenting to,” said Jakobie Fultz, a Marshwood sophomore who helped lead the ice delivery men stop. “It’s been really fun working with them because they really wanted to do this and were ready to go and very excited from the beginning.”
The camaraderie the groups built during the weeks of planning the hike was apparent when all the leaders met at their stops for a final run-through the day before the hike, according to Zottoli-Breen.
“At conclusion of the practice, I was down at Sarah Orne Jewett House checking on them, and the third graders and high schoolers were sitting in a circle playing a duck-duck-goose style game. Others were giving piggyback rides and laughing,” she said.
At the end of the annual hike Friday, the trekkers, the third graders and the high schoolers were treated to a hot dog cookout, and then the younger kids played old-timey games on the Central School playground.
Several times, organizers thanked the dozens of parent volunteers, members of the historic society, various South Berwick businesses and citizens, as well as the town’s Police and Fire departments and countless school employees who helped pull off the hike.
That community spirit of everyone pitching in is one of many things that makes the Hike Through History so special, St. Pierre said.
“It’s about so much more than history,” she said. “It’s about collaborating with others, it’s about community, citizenship, civic pride. For me, it ticks every box.”
