“We are teaching students to think about their audience and to practice empathy. Most of all, we are teaching them patience. It’s not just about finding the right answers, but asking the right questions as you make your way through.”

At the 500-acre farm where Karen grew up, along the Connecticut River in Hadley and Northampton, Mass., the kitchen table was “a place where you just never knew who was going to be there or how long they were going to stay,” she says. For as long as she can remember, there were always visitors. “My parents knew we couldn’t travel, so they brought the world to us. We had people from all over — people who came to work on the farm but also to learn about the business.” Given the farm’s location in close proximity to the University of Massachusetts, “there were researchers from Japan and people from Costa Rica, Morocco, Nigeria, and all over Europe.”

Karen’s family has farmed in this part of Massachusetts for 10 generations. They were among the first Anglos in the area, according to Karen. “There are so many stories,” she says. Her family’s farm, which has evolved over the years but is still run by her father and her two brothers, is home to 2,000 hogs and 800 sheep. “We grew up with a sense that we were feeding the world in some small way.”

Karen loved working on the farm. “There’s a lot you learn about dealing with people when you spend a lot of time with animals. They can’t talk to you, you have to work with them, you have to observe more than you assert yourself . . . . ,” says Karen. “Farming is about things you don’t have a lot of control over, so you really have to think about your resources and how you use them to address those challenges.”

These powers of observation and creative problem-solving skills are also relevant to the study of historical objects, in Karen’s view. While she always worked on farm while she was growing up, Karen also started working at a local historic house museum when she was in seventh grade, which sparked her interest in material culture. “My job was to go to the attic and read this woman’s 18th-century diaries.” This experience, along with her own family’s history and, especially on her mother’s side, a collection of historical objects and great “raconteurs,” opened a window for Karen to studying the past. She went to Amherst College, where she chose an interdisciplinary path in the American studies program, which included the study of material culture. Her senior thesis, “A Patchwork Lineage,” focused on a family quilt, started before the Civil War, and the history of quilt-making, “showing the social history dimension of quilts and that really got me going.”

After graduating from college, Karen worked briefly in admissions at Amherst, where her mentor, who had taught at Exeter for many years and who knew then-Loomis Chaffee Headmaster John Ratté, encouraged her to consider teaching. “He said: ‘First decide if you want to teach, then decide who you want to teach, and if you want to learn how to teach, you should go to a place like Loomis, because they support new teachers.’” She took a one-year sabbatical replacement post in the History Department at Loomis while also coaching girls varsity basketball and varsity softball and working in College Guidance.

After leaving Loomis for a research fellowship through Amherst College, a stint at Colonial Williamsburg, a master’s degree from Winterthur and the University of Delaware, and employment as an independent historian, Karen came back to Loomis to work full time in 1996. She took over as the school’s archivist in 2010 and led the Centennial Planning Committee in 2012, working with John Ratté and others to create a school history and other publications and to plan the 2014 Centennial Celebration.

Karen loves teaching the College-Level U.S. History curriculum. “The assignments are the authentic work of actual historians,” she says. “We are teaching students to think about their audience and to practice empathy. Most of all, we are teaching them patience. It’s not just about finding the right answers, but asking the right questions as you make your way through.”

“It’s a lot like animals, right?” she adds. “These objects don’t talk, but if you listen, if you observe the visual details that you see . . . you can connect objects to the way people learn.”