Surnames like Bushnell and Sherman are familiar for lots of contemporary reasons, but visitors to and residents of Connecticut might not realize that David Bushnell, who was born in today\u2019s Westport, designed in 1776 the first submarine used in combat, and Roger Sherman, who lived in New Milford and later New Haven, was the only person to sign all four of the country\u2019s founding documents.<\/p>\n
Their stories and more are detailed on the markers as part of Connecticut\u2019s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The 4-by-3-foot aluminum signs were unveiled Friday, June 26, during a ceremony in Wethersfield.<\/p>\n Horowitz says he\u2019d already started thinking about a way to place historical markers around the state when DOT officials approached him about marking the semiquincentennial. Together, they conceived a plan to locate 38 signs at rest areas, service plazas, bus stations, and train stations, where the DOT estimates tens of thousands of people will see them each week.<\/p>\n Each sign features a picture of a historical item \u2013 like the hat Phineas Meigs wore when he died as the last known casualty of the Revolutionary War in Connecticut \u2013 and a short description of its significance, along with the museum location of the object.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea was to tell some stories about Connecticut that may be familiar, and others that are worth knowing more about,\u201d Horowitz says. \u201cAnd whatever general knowledge people have about the American Revolution, I think the specifics remain arresting \u2013 like seeing the candleholder that a Salisbury miner carried as he hauled iron for a Continental Army cannon.\u201d<\/p>\n The sign erected at the westbound rest stop on Interstate 84 in Willington that depicts the powder horn carried into battle by Prince Simbo, a Black man from Glastonbury, is a favorite for Saemi Yoon<\/a>, a digital media and design<\/a> MFA student from UConn. The horn is engraved with the word \u201cLiberty\u201d and adorned with drawings of a bird, deer, and leaf.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Liberty\u2019 as he inscribes it on his powder horn must have reminded him, every time he filled his musket, of the stakes \u2013 not just life and death stakes, but also the ideological and political stakes of what he was fighting for. And then, he\u2019s such a brilliant artist. In this one object, we have the military story and the political story, along with a fleeting glimpse, but a meaningful one, of an artist,\u201d Horowitz says.<\/p>\n Yoon says the powder horn sign is a favorite because of proximity \u2013 she lives not far from Glastonbury where Simbo was born and the horn was made, and says, \u201cThat closeness made the story feel much more real and personal than something out of a history book.\u201d<\/p>\n But as an immigrant from Korea, Yoon says the full series<\/a> helped her learn more about the American Revolution and Connecticut\u2019s contributions. For several months last semester, she and a group of four other students designed the series through UConn\u2019s Design Center Studio<\/a> using Yoon\u2019s template as a basis.<\/p>\n \u201cThe main goal of this project was building the design system, and also I prioritized the information delivery over creating something merely pretty,\u201d Yoon says. \u201cI tried to focus on creating a clear visual hierarchy to deliver the content and the image of the historical artifacts much more clearly and easily to the audience.\u201d<\/p>\n The Design Center Studio, she explains, is a place where classes work on real-life projects like this to experience, before they get into the workforce, what it\u2019s like to collaborate with each other in a professional setting to satisfy a client-customer.<\/p>\n One detail that few people who see the signs will ever notice came from this collaboration between the students, Horowitz, and instructor Steve Bowden.<\/p>\n The green background on signs like the one depicting Timothy Lee\u2019s canteen, or the yellow for Connecticut currency from 1776, the purple showing Nathan Hale\u2019s diary, and the blue for a sketch of Newgate Prison in East Granby are extracted colors from the Connecticut state flag.<\/p>\n \u201cAll the choices, we tried to make intentional, whether it\u2019s putting a specific sign in the region adjacent to where it happened, the colors that reflect the state flag, or the objects themselves that are drawn from Connecticut institutions,\u201d Horowitz says. \u201cEven though they may look like modest signs, a lot of thought went into trying to make them the best version of themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n Yoon says the design team met with Horowitz periodically during the semester, taking the still images and narratives he supplied and fitting them into her design.<\/p>\n \u201cI enrolled in this course to learn more about visual hierarchy, typography, color, and so on, because I thought learning more about those principles would be very helpful for my study area,\u201d says Yoon, who generally focuses on interactive media design. \u201cThis whole course was a great experience for me to learn those design principles and to experience working on a project for a public purpose. Having the opportunity to contribute to this meaningful project has been an honor.\u201d<\/p>\n The team\u2019s efforts, Yoon says, have earned them a Gold Award in the 50th annual Connecticut Art Directors Club Awards Show in the Student Print category.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re grateful to UConn professor and State Historian Andy Horowitz for helping CTDOT identify the most compelling stories to share and the best locations for each sign, and to the UConn design students whose creativity and vision truly brought those stories to life. Their contributions were essential to this project\u2019s success,\u201d\u00a0DOT spokesperson Eva Zymaris says.<\/p>\n At Hartford Union Station, visitors can find a sign detailing Lemuel Haynes\u2019s sermon \u201cLiberty, Further Extended,\u201d an important document by an indentured servant who was born in today\u2019s West Hartford. Haynes completed the term of his indenture when he turned 21 in 1774, and joined the colonial militia.<\/p>\n After serving for two years, Horowitz explains, Haynes studied theology, and was the first ordained Black man to become a Congregational minister in the United States. He did that in Torrington.<\/p>\n In 1776, when he heard the Declaration of Independence, Haynes wrote \u201cLiberty, Further Extended,\u201d which states that if liberty is important to white people, then it must be equally as important to Black people.<\/p>\n \u201cThe American Revolution is so complicated because for all the talk of liberty and the American colonists\u2019 enslavement to King George, some of those same colonists enslaved African Americans,\u201d Horowitz explains. \u201cThis document shows that Lemuel Haynes, along with many others, immediately understood the implications of the Preamble.\u201d<\/p>\n Haynes wrote his sermon in longhand and copied the Declaration of Independence\u2019s Preamble next to his own words as a direct comparison, Horowitz says, adding a footnote that the sermon had been forgotten until the 1980s, when a historian found it in a library box labeled as miscellaneous.<\/p>\n Proof that 250 years into the country\u2019s history, new discoveries can still be had.<\/p>\n \u201cEven as Connecticut state historian, I am continually amazed by how rich Connecticut history is,\u201d Horowitz says. \u201cThere is nothing that I care about as a person that hasn\u2019t been struggled over in Connecticut. Focusing on the American Revolution is a relatively narrow window. The 1770s, out of all human history, is a tiny blip, and Connecticut is comparatively a very small place.<\/p>\n \u201cYet in doing the research for this project, I found people from America, Europe, and Africa fighting over the meaning of freedom, making use of the state\u2019s environmental landscape, struggling over what citizenship is or ought to mean, carving their highest artistic aspirations into pieces of bone or sewing it into needlepoint,\u201d he continues. \u201cIt just gave me a sense that the whole world is here, if we are willing to open our eyes to it.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The historical markers from the Connecticut Department of Transportation, UConn associate professor and State Historian Andy Horowitz, and students from UConn\u2019s Design Center Studio can be found around the state throughout 2026. The project is part of America 250 CT<\/a>, administered by CT Humanities<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And while UConn wasn\u2019t around in 1776, its fingerprints are all over the project<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":160,"featured_media":247921,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1711,2226,1715,2460,2459,2193,2649,2650,1914,2712,2235,2198,2225,2227,2234],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2368],"class_list":["post-247579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-culture","category-clas","category-community-impact","category-faculty","category-graduate-students","category-hartford-county","category-blue-pride","category-blue-impact","category-sfa","category-student-success","category-today-homepage","category-tolland-county","category-uconn-storrs","category-uconn-edu-homepage","category-university-life"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-08 12:04:53","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247579"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":248006,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247579\/revisions\/248006"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/247921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247579"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=247579"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=247579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/6-26-2026-America-250-Sign-and-Reduced-Fares-51-200x300.jpg\")
Student Designers on the Job<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/willingtonsign-300x225.jpg\")
New Discoveries, Even Today<\/strong><\/h3>\n