Students unearth history, inspiration

July 11, 2006 BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA Staff Reporter Twenty miles east of Kankakee, on the side of a dusty one-lane gravel road, lay the abandoned scraps of one family's story, gutted years ago by a fire. There, in Hopkins Park, the cinder block skeleton of a garage and the outer walls of what was once a small home still stand. Those remnants are breathing new life as 22 students and two Field Museum archeologists sift through its weedy terrain hoping to unearth clues about the people who once lived there, and that of the Native Americans who had settled there before them. The Field Museum has brought the Budding Archeologist Field School to the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students of Lorenzo R. Smith Elementary School in Hopkins Park as part of an educational outreach program designed so kids can investigate the lives of early settlers through hands-on mapping, surveying and excavating an African-American settlement dating back to the Reconstruction era. Full Story: http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-dig11.html