Brown County High School history teacher Emily Lewellen stood beside the grave of fallen World War I soldier Aaron Ray Griffin in France. With her was Griffin’s Silver Star Medal, the United States Armed Forces’ third-highest personal decoration for valor in combat.
She presented the medal to him as he lay in his eternal resting place, thousands of miles away from his home in Brown County, and more than 100 years after he was killed fighting for his country.
“While you and I are not actually related, you have become my family, so I decided to do what no one else can and convert your medal,” Lewellen said as tears began to build while she read a eulogy she wrote for him.
“Today, I am proud to present with your Silver Star. Thank you for your service and for your sacrifice. You will never be forgotten.”
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]Last winter, Lewellen was one of 18 teachers from across the country selected to participate in “Memorializing the Fallen,” a professional development opportunity through the National History Day program. It was a partnership with the World War I Centennial Commission and the Pritzker Military Museum and Library, which helped to fund the teachers going to France and Belgium to study WWI.
Lewellen was no stranger to History Day, as she has been working with the program since she was a graduate student and helped get the program restarted at Brown County Junior High School when she first started there as a history teacher.
“It’s been really great. I’ve had kids go to nationals every year that I’ve done it, which is awesome,” she said.
Lewellen now sponsors the History Day program at the high school.
She decided to apply for the WWI professional development opportunity because she believes this war is often overlooked in history and lesson plans.
“World War I is often seen as a stepping stone to World War II, and we don’t spend enough time talking about the men and women who fought in World War I and why they’re important and why that war was important and how it completely shifted the world,” Lewellen said as she sits in her classroom.
She wanted to learn more about this war to share with her students back in Brown County by going to see firsthand where many lost their lives.
“I loved the idea of being able to go to the places where they fought, walk in their footsteps and to be right there. It was absolutely amazing,” she said.
Telling his story
Lewellen went overseas over the summer. She had to pick a soldier who was buried in one of the WWI cemeteries the group would visit. She was tasked with researching his life to create a profile and write his eulogy.
She spent six months piecing together Ray Griffin’s life, which was no easy task because Griffin has no living family now in Brown County. He never married and did not have any children.
Lewellen used ancestry databases to learn about his family, looked at his school records from the Brown County Historical Society, and searched files from the National Archives on his death and military service.
Griffin was a member of the Army’s 16th Infantry Regiment assigned to Company I of the Second Battalion. Shortly after he joined, the 16th Infantry Regiment became a part of the new 1st Division.
Lewellen also worked with the president of the 16th Infantry Association to gather information, like roll calls and a map showing where Griffin was killed in battle.
The association president also told Lewellen that Griffin had earned a Citation Star posthumously for “gallantry in action and especially meritorious service,” according to the eulogy Lewellen wrote.
Griffin was born in 1895 to Sarah Pogue and Adam Griffin. He was the fifth-oldest child. When the United States entered WWI in 1917, Brown County sent 301 men overseas, and Griffin was one of the 12 men who died in war.
He experienced combat multiple times before his death, including having to stay in the trenches for 72 days with no shower or fresh clothes.
“I can only imagine the strength Griffin and his fellow soldiers must have possessed to endure such difficult conditions,” Lewellen said in her eulogy.
Griffin and his division were then moved to the Battle of Soissons where he and the third battalion provided support for the First Battalion, which did not last long as they had to move toward the battle target, according to the eulogy.
The men were ultimately successful in the battle, but Griffin was killed two days in, and was buried on the field of honor by his fellow soldiers.
Griffin was given the Citation Star for his actions during the battle where he lost his life. Lewellen applied to the Army on Griffin’s behalf to get his Citation Star converted to the Silver Star Medal, which replaced the Citation Star in 1932.
“It was super emotional,” Lewellen said of presenting Griffin with his Silver Star.
Lewellen did not have a moment to spend with Griffin at his grave before giving his eulogy and putting sand from Omaha Beach on his tombstone so that visitors could see his name clearly.
“It was really hard because I didn’t have a moment to collect myself,” she said.
“You spend so much time researching and getting to know who this man was. Still to this day, I’m the person who knows about him in this world because his family is gone. It was just really emotional because I feel like he’s part of my family, and I got to see where he was and spend some time with him.”
Lewellen also created a lesson plan on the women who fought in WWI to share with her students this school year. Those women included ambulance drivers, nurses and the Hello Girls who were on the front lines of battles as telephone operators.
The plan will also focus on the women who were actually enlisted in the Navy and received benefits when the war was over.
“People don’t really know anything about them, especially our kids. It’s always about men when it comes to war, but there were so many women that were over there and who died in the line of duty. I saw some of their graves when I was in France,” she said.
Through her trip to France, Lewellen met a teacher from West Virginia who later told her she had been picked to represent West Virginia as part of the Women’s Suffrage Float in next year’s Rose Bowl parade in California. Next year is the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women their right to vote. The float is sponsored by the National Women’s History Alliance.
A week later, Lewellen received another text asking if she would want to represent Indiana wearing all white and in suffragette dress. The answer was an easy “Yes,” she said.
“I am so excited, I was jumping and down,” she said.
Lewellen had to raise $1,000 for the National Women’s History Alliance to participate in the program, which she was able to do thanks to the generous Brown County community, she said.
The parade will happen on New Years Day.
Personalizing history
Lewellen also works with local veterans on a variety of projects.
Brown County High School Principal Matt Stark said her work with veterans is one way she personalizes history for her students.
Last year at the school district’s Veterans Day program, Lewellen was named teacher of the year for the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 6915 here in Brown County. Her students nominated her for the award, and Lewellen then had to write an essay detailing her work with veterans in the schools and in the community.
Lewellen stood out to the VFW, Commander Don Birden said.
“She was just outstanding with the students and with all of the veterans and everything that way. She was very easy to work with. Anything she could do to help, she volunteered, and she was just an outstanding young lady,” he said.
Lewellen was selected as the district competition winner after her essay was judged by Hanover College professors. Lewellen was then named the 2018-2019 high school teacher of the year by the VFW for the entire state of Indiana.
“It was awesome. It’s really, really cool. The VFW is so amazing. Our veterans here in Brown County are exceptional and have been so supportive of me and everything that I’ve done. I love them all to pieces. It was just an honor to get that award and be a part of that,” Lewellen said.
“I work really hard, so it was nice to kind of get that recognition.”
Along with being History Day sponsor, Lewellen has been in charge of the high school’s History Club for the last four years with fellow history teacher Alecia Adams.
Last year, the History Club went to Boston and to Nashville, Tennessee. Every year the club goes to the Ohio Renaissance Festival. This spring, the club will take off to Louisville for a historical tour of a haunted sanatorium. Members also plan to go to the Hoosier Author Fair in Indianapolis later this year.
For the past three years, the club has gone to Indianapolis every Sept. 11 to visit the memorial there and participate in a ceremony. Brown County students speak during the ceremony every year. This year, senior Chloee Robison spoke about the impact Sept. 11 had on her generation.
The club also made a wreath and gave people ribbons to put on it before leaving it at the memorial.
Now, the club has at least 30 active members. Lewellen said Robison, who serves as the club’s president, has helped to grow membership.
“She is just really outgoing, really friendly and is excited about everything and passionate, so it’s because of her leadership, too, that I think we’ve had so many more members,” she said.
“We always tell people we don’t just sit around and talk about history and push up our glasses and be nerds, but we’re a little nerdy. It’s fun.”
Lewellen and Robison are taking off this week to go to Holland to participate in a History Day program similar to what Lewellen did earlier this summer. Since there is a not a Brown County veteran buried at the cemetery they will visit, Robison is researching a veteran from Johnson County with Lewellen’s guidance.
The History Club also supports local veterans with fundraisers, like “Jeans for Brown County Vets,” which allows for teachers to pay a certain amount in each building to wear jeans for a week. That money is then donated to the VFW.
The club also works to help organize the annual Veterans Day program. Students volunteer that day to escort veterans around and get them anything they need at the breakfast or lunch. Club members also carry war banners during the ceremony and walk the veterans out to their seats.
“We’ve had more and more kids involved as the years go on and it’s something really cool,” Lewellen said.
Adams and Lewellen presented the money raised during the district-wide jeans fundraiser to the VFW during the ceremony. In the past, the History Club has presented documentaries on local veterans during the ceremony, but this year, Lewellen took that time to present her eulogy on Griffin and speak about her trip to France.
High school history teachers also help organize the Voice of Democracy speech contests with the VFW. The top speeches are read at the Veterans Day program. Junior high students also present their Patriot’s Pen speeches.
If all of that didn’t keep her busy enough, Lewellen is also the eighth-grade girls basketball coach, a team that went undefeated last season. She is also the junior high assistant track coach, serves as the high ability co-coach at the high school, and co-sponsors the student council.
‘Truly a treasure’
Lewellen describes herself as a history nerd. She knew she wanted to be a history teacher during her freshman year of college at Northern Arizona University.
She grew up in northern California before moving to Arizona with her family to finish her high school career.
During her time in college, she student-taught in Germany on an American Air Force Base through the Department of Defense Dependents Schools. She lived there for six months.
She eventually moved to Indiana after earning her content area master’s degree in history. She worked briefly as a paraprofessional at an elementary school in Bloomington before being hired on mid-semester at Brown County High School.
Lewellen then began teaching history at the junior high for three years before returning to the high school to take over teaching government and history for retiring teacher Gerry Long. This is her seventh year with the district.
“I like stories, and history is just that. It’s one big story and it’s a bunch of people’s stories all put together, and how we got here and why things are the way that they are,” she said.
She barely uses textbooks in her classroom. Instead, she chooses to share the humanity in history with her students — “the fact that it’s not just a bunch of names and dates and old, boring things that happened that have no relevance and don’t matter,” she said.
“I try to kind of show them the human stories behind what’s happening and how they can kind of connect to it and they can see why things are the way that they are.”
Lewellen uses resources like newspaper articles and military records to analyze events from time periods. Recently, her students completed an ancestry project, “just to try and connect immigration and westward expansion, urbanization, trying to tie it all together with kids’ actual family history and try to give them that approach to it,” she said.
Stark says Lewellen makes history come alive for her students.
“She is a teacher you want teaching history and promoting student voice and experience,” he said.
“She is truly a treasure to have on staff and adds to the richness of our school and our community.”
