Students enjoy learning about history of local landmarks

Last week I went on a field trip with my class to the John G. Riley House Museum and the Goodwood Museum. We first went to the Riley House, not far from the capitol, and went to some stations. The whole fourth grade went; so three classes went to one station while the other three went to the other. My class first went to a station with a man who talked about patented inventions by African-American slaves. The next station was about feeling proud about yourself and creations people discovered using their wonderful minds. After all that was over, we got on the bus and went over to the Goodwood Museum and Gardens Plantation. There, the class ate lunch. Right before we were going to move on, a WCTV news reporter came up to us and interviewed my friend, Chase Fortier, for news. After that, we moved on. The next thing we came to was a jazz band called Jazz Jams. They talked to us about how it would be without jazz and what it really meant to the African-American slaves. They played 3 or 4 songs for us by various people, and then that ended the jazz festival.

Next we walked over to the Goodwood mansion. My class and another class went into a room where the tour guide talked to us about the history of the house. They said there was a man who bought 5,000 or so acres of land on the Goodwood plantation. He tried to get his wife to come down and live with him there, but she refused, so he said he would make a huge mansion in the lot for her. At that, she took the offer and started sailing south toward the plantation the man had gotten. As if it never would have happened, they got shipwrecked and died. Then someone else became the owner of the lot. It kept on passing through people until it came to one man. After he died, his wife remarried to yet another man. Then, his once widow wife died and he locked her dead body in her room and never went in there. Pretty soon, the whole mansion was turned into a museum and gardens. There had been men and women with altogether 7 different last names as total at all different times.  We toured other rooms of the house and exited. As we were going to get our lunch boxes, a cameraman from the Leon County Schools Network came up to the class asking if we would all like to say a sentence one by one about what we learned at Goodwood. After everyone got a chance, all of the classes got on busses and went back to school.

I interviewed a couple of students from my class about our field trip. One of them, Nathan Burnett, quoted: “My favorite part of the field trip was the jazz festival music and how they talked to us about how people lived in the Goodwood mansion.” Another classmate I interviewed, Sammie Melles, remarked, “I learned that in the summer it got up to 130ºF in the attic and so they would open the windows to cool the air.” In conclusion to that, they had really high ceilings so they could turn on a fire, forcing the warm air to rise, which is why it got to such a high temperature in the attic.

Over all, the field trip was awesome, and it might have even been the best field trip me and my buds’ ever went on.