Mandlyn Schrock linked arms with her cousin, just like she used to do more than 50 years ago when they walked together from their school to Bellevue Square. Reminiscing about those days, the two strolled through the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History’s exhibition “Drawn Here: Stories from Hartford’s North End” last week, looking at the images from the graphic novels displayed on the walls.

“This exhibition is personal because, to realize we have so much history within our own community in the North End and people doing great things, makes me feel I didn’t have to leave, I could have stayed right here,” Schrock, who lives in Bloomfield, said.

The opening ceremony for the exhibition on Feb. 12 welcomed Hartford residents, particularly those from the North End, to view five original graphic novels created by Connecticut creative professional artists, with the help of students from Hartford Classical Magnet School and a whole team of oral historians, teachers and museum staff.

The North End has been home to many groups of migrants for hundreds of years. And so, the novels aim to illustrate through fiction the experiences of these groups redefining American identity: the Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Black Southerners, West Indians, Puerto Ricans and others who settled either briefly or for generations in the area. 

Katie Heidsiek, senior exhibition developer at the museum, said the guiding theme of the exhibition was the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It got them thinking about immigration and what it means to be an American as a topic for the stories being told.

But Heidsiek wanted to do things differently in this exhibition, bridging the museum with its North End neighbors.

“What if we really turned it into a storytelling format that would be a way that people could connect with it, and particularly young people approaching that age of 18? They’re going to start voting, thinking about these questions of identity and what it means to be an American,” Heidsiek said.

For two and a half years, the museum worked in partnership with community participants to shape the project. This meant what originally was one graphic novel became five novels that approach the North End history from different angles, from the history of the Poquonock Native Americans to the area’s religious diversity, the impact of Hartford’s Great Flood and the I-84 highway construction that split the city and displaced families. 

“It’s easy to open up conversations with communities and then to say, thanks for your thoughts. We’re going to do this thing that we were going to do, and what needs to happen is a really open dialog, you adapt to the feedback of the community,” Heidsiek said.

The exhibition, which is on the main floor of the museum, covers the walls with the five fictional stories that combine the current realities of North End residents with important historical figures, migration patterns and events that shaped the neighborhood’s history and that of Hartford. 

At times, the fictional stories reflect part of the artists’ family history, like the novel created by North End native Tyrone “ZeroSnake” Motley.

Motley’s work shows the story of a family that moved from Americus, Georgia to Hartford, searching for safe, affordable and stable housing in the 1930s. The characters in the illustrations resembled his family.

“Ruben is named after my grandfather… The matriarch of the story, May, is named after my grandmother, Lily May Long,” Motley said at the opening of the exhibition. “No matter the origin we are all drawn here at the end of the day… we love Hartford.”

As he watched the full set up of his novel on the wall, Dr. Celeste Ashe Johnson’s grandson curiously asked him questions about it.

Next to the illustrations is a phone cabin, where people can hear stories directly from the people students interviewed, like Johnson’s own about Hope Church. They can also watch video clips like Maria Sanchez’s fight for bilingual education for Puerto Ricans in Hartford.

In the center and on the sides of each of the rooms, historical documents and objects lie inside vitrines, next to family artifacts. Johnson’s husband’s first preaching robe is in the Faith Story room.

“The project has a lot of personal meaning, because in three months, I’m going to be 80 years old, and it has caused me to reflect on so many things that occurred in my life that I can resonate with in this museum, and even sitting through the interview for the museum, it has been beneficial for me,” Johnson said.

Shrock’s cousin, Stacey McGriff-Hodges, whom she wandered around the North End with as a kid, said she wants the museum to keep doing projects like this, bridging communities with their history.

“I’ve never been in this museum, so to have something like this here makes me want to come back,” McGriff-Hodges reflected.

Heidsiek said in the next few months, possibly by the Fourth of July weekend, they hope to have some type of publication to accompany the exhibit.