Williams Intermediate School, Bridgewater- May 22nd

41° 59' 03" N
70° 58' 47" W
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The EarthView team is happy to be visiting Williams Intermediate School in Bridgewater today which is located not too far from the University! If you take a look at the map above, you can see that BSU is located within the map view for the school. While we usually travel farther, it is nice to stay in town and visit with the local students!

About 6 years ago, Dr. Hayes-Bohanan and wife Pamela -- a BSU librarian -- were inspired by an NPR series, Main Street USA, in which reporters traveled around to different cities and towns and reported about what was happening on Main Street. They decided to conduct a project of their own called, "The Bridgewaters Project" in which they would travel around to all of the different Bridgewaters and record their travels on their blog, Bridgewaters Project.They discovered that Bridgewater is a fairly common name for a town and at the time they started the blog in 2009, they knew of Bridgewater, Vermont; Bridgewater, Maine; Bridgewater, New Hampshire; Bridgewater, Connecticut; Bridgewater, New York; Bridgewater, New Jersey; Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Canada and Bridgwater, England. 

Additionally, there is a Bridgewater, Virginia and a university is located in that town as well which is the reason why BSU's domain is bridgew.edu since Bridgewater College in Bridgewater, Virginia took the domain bridgewater.edu. An interesting thing to note is that Bridgewater State University was originally named the "Normal School" and was chosen to be placed here in town because the people of Bridgewater committed more assistance then competing towns, mostly in terms of making rooms available for students to rent. The entire school (dorms, classrooms and offices) was in one building, which burned down in 1925.

Bridgewater, Massachusetts was incorporated as a town in 1656 and originally included all or parts of the towns of Rockland, Whitman and Avon. These towns were dropped early and by 1716, the remaining town of Bridgewater was divided into four pieces: North Bridgewater, South Bridgewater, East Bridgewater and West Bridgewater. South Bridgewater eventually became simply the town of Bridgewater and North Bridgewater became the city of Brockton. 



Bridgewater, Massachusetts is also home to the "Bridgewater Triangle" where strange paranormal phenomena occurs in a 200 square-mile area centered on the Hockomock Swamp. We will save this topic for another blog post as we could go quite a bit in depth on this since Eva the EarthView blogger enjoys reading up on ghost stories and the like. 

We hope that the students of Williams Intermediate School enjoyed their visit with EarthView today and we hope to visit again soon! 

Seismograph 

Update from the school: During our visit today, we discovered that William's Intermediate is home to seismograph, a machine that monitors seismic activity, also known as earthquakes! If you have been following our blog posts, you would have noticed that we have been talking quite frequently about earthquakes since the devastating one that hit Nepal. The nice secretary in the front office told us that this seismograph picked up some activity during the beginning of May...interesting!!