About This Project

The Goodwin Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church web site was created by Mr. Burgoyne's 6th grade class at Wildwood School in Amherst, Massachusetts, in January, 2002.  Our endeavor was part of the Amherst History Project. Amherst Public Schools received a grant that let us make a web site. The grant was created to encourage Amherst elementary students to research historical sites in Amherst, Massachusetts. The grant was from the Massachusetts Department of Education, with help from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (we appreciate their funding and help).

How We Did This Project

We first visited Goodwin Memorial and gathered information about it from the Reverend there. We learned a lot from him about the history of the church, and what it is like now. We also took pictures of the inside and outside of the church. We each took turns with the camera, taking pictures we thought we needed.

On the same day, when we were done at the church, we went down the road to the Jones Library. There, we went upstairs to where the oldest books are. To hold some of these books or touch them, we had to wear special white gloves to protect the books from the oils on our hands. We found a lot of information at the Jones Library, because of all the information in the older books, articles, maps, etc.

We also found some of our information from articles that we read in class. We read one of the articles all together as a class. The others were assigned to individuals when we finished other work early. In these articles, we highlighted the most important things, and used some of them on our website.

Soon we were ready to start putting our website together on Microsoft Front Page. This was the software that we used for the project. The class was split into groups of four or five to work on different things that related to our topic. For example, we had a group to do the timeline, a group to do the history of A.M.E. Zion Church, a group to do the history of Goodwin Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church, and a group to do something on important people to the church. After each group was done with their part of the website, we put them all together. Next the project was posted to the web server and sent out over the Internet.

If you have questions or comments about our site, we would love to hear from you.  Email us:  Wildwood School.

Thank You

We would like to thank many people for helping us create this site.  Rev. Lewis graciously allowed us to visit the church.  Dr. Getis helped us put the web site together. She also found and posted information from fragile documents to her Internet site.  The Jones Library let us visit the archives to do research.  

This project would not have been possible without a grant from the Massachusetts Department of Education and the support of the Center for Computer-Based Instructional Technology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  We are glad that Mr. Burgoyne choose our class to work on this project.

We would love to hear from your. If you have questions or comments please email us.

Reflections of the Authors

I enjoyed putting this whole project together, and finding information from people associated with the church.      -Anna

-I really enjoyed this project; I learned much more from researching this myself than I could have from a book.     -Cathy

I learned a lot about African-American History as well as the history of the Goodwin Church. I really enjoyed visiting the church and creating this web site.           -Claire

I learned a lot about African American churches during the project. It was a great experience.        -EDDIE

In this project I learned that churches could have a lot more history than I thought.          -Hanna

I enjoyed learning about the Goodwin Memorial A.M.E. Church. It was also interesting to look at our home page every few minutes and see how much it had changed.         -Hannah

I liked this project because Black Christians made a good church out of pride and dignity. It’s important to me because Black people all pitched in to make a church where they could learn and express their feelings to God.              -Isaac

Before this project, I didn't even think about churches' histories, but after I had a whole other way of looking at them.             -Jeremy

~I enjoyed learning about Amherst’s first black churches and why they decided to split apart~     ~Jess

I liked this project because I enjoyed researching and learning about Amherst’s history.     - Josh

This project was an awesome experience because we got to go to the church and research its history, and I would be happy to do something like it again.     -Kathleen

I learned that Booker T. Washington was one of the first members of the A.M.E Zion Church congregation.     - TIGGY

I learned that the Goodwin Church was one of the first African American Churches in Amherst.           -Matt

Doing this project made me think a lot more about the history of churches.     -Meghan

I thought it was very fun and enjoyable to figure out all the complicated twists and turns of this church’s history.         -Noah

I liked working on this project because I learned a lot about the Goodwin church.       -Stewart

I thought it was interesting researching how people went to church back in the early 1900’s.             -Zachary

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