The Research: What's Missing
While we were content with the research that we were able to find regarding the historical and evocative narratives, we wish the research included some other key apects of Sampsonville.
While we knew how many children and families lived in Sampsonville, there is nothing that shows an exact list of their names. This shows a depersonalization of Sampsonville in which we are only able to uncover general facts.
We learned that the males attended classes at Bates but we are curious about how they integrated into Bates classes and integrated with the other students who didn't live in the barracks.
We never learned about how Charles Sampson's colleagues viewed Sampsonville and supported the idea of adding these barracks to the Bates campus. In addition, we are curious about how the other students living in the Bates dorms would feel about having families living in the barracks.
We found that a lot of the research was very repetitive where many documents were filled with the exact same information as each other. We were hoping that the various types of documents in the archive would allude to completely different aspects of Sampsonville.
Additionally, there is no narrative describing what life was like for the children who grew up in Sampsonville and how living in Army barracks on a college campus influenced their life.