MONROE — Last school year, a trio of Northside Elementary fifth graders worked together for nine months on a school project. Elise Deprez, Stella Murray and Brynlee Roelli, all students of Sarah Compton, researched and interviewed Civil War historians, creating a video documentary on Cordelia Harvey: Angel in a Black Cape. Compton herself is a 2021 Lowell Milken Center Fellow Educator.

For their efforts, the trio was awarded $1,000 for Outstanding Elementary School Project through the Lowell Milken Center (LMC) for Unsung Heroes — the top prize offered for their age division. The internationally acclaimed center awarded a total of $15,500 in cash prizes to elementary, middle and high school-aged students throughout not just the U.S., but the world.

“Each year we receive hundreds of entries from all over the United States and all over the world,” said Norm Conard, LMC Chief Executive Officer, who presented the students with the award. “We have an opportunity today to say thank you.”

Now sixth graders, Deprez, Murray and Roelli were honored onstage at the Monroe Middle School in front of the rest of their class, plus various staff, administrators and their parents.

“I’m incredibly proud of them,” Compton said. “You can’t spend nine months working on a project without being committed to it, determined and passionate. They were all three.”

According to the LMC, this international competition inspires students to develop primary and secondary research projects which share the stories of Unsung Heroes from history whose accomplishments remain largely unknown to the public. Entry projects can be in the form of documentaries, performances, exhibits or informational websites.

LMC, based in Fort Scott, Kansas, now has a museum highlighting education, and the three Monroe honorees will have their names etched into the wall for all visitors to see. Established in 2007, the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes (LMC) discovers, develops and communicates the stories of unsung heroes who have made a profound and positive impact on history, yet are largely unrecognized by contemporary generations. LMC has reached over 3,000,000 students and 30,000 schools in all 50 states and countries around the world.

Their documentary, Cordelia Harvey: Angel in a Black Cape, shines a light on the care the “Wisconsin Angel” displayed toward Civil War soldiers who often received treatment at “makeshift” field hospitals. Mixing history with expert perspectives, the students show how Harvey’s support to secure state hospitals for soldiers away from war zones bettered the quality of life for soldiers and their families.

The wife of former Wisconsin Governor Louis Harvey, Cordelia went to Washington D.C. during the Civil War and, after multiple meetings, convinced President Abraham Lincoln to go against the advice of his military and medical strategists at the time, which had concluded that sending wounded soldiers away from the front lines would raise the risk for desertion. Cordelia argued that by sending wounded soldiers to hospitals in their home state, near family and in better sanitation quarters than the diseased-riddled field hospitals, would not only save more lives, but increase recruitment into the army. The model is still used in current times.

The three hospitals erected in Wisconsin — one in Madison, Milwaukee and Prairie du Chien — eventually had other uses, like homes for orphaned children from the war.

Roelli said she loved creating the project, and remembers that while researching she had to go into quarantine lockdown. “We got around it, and it was still really fun. 

Deprez said she enjoyed learning about Cordelia from the perspective of the historians they interviewed.

Compton said the group did all the research themselves, wrote the speeches, did all of the audio recording themselves, including take after take, over and over and over again until they “got it right”.

“It’s just a tremendous joy to work with them. The documentary is a credit to their work,” Compton said. 

The grand prize winner by the LMC was 11th grader Gracie Conrad of Nebraska and her project, Betty Goudsmit-Oudkerk: Resistance Member, Unsung Hero. Goudsmit-Oudkert was a Dutch teenager who helped smuggle more than 600 Jewish children away from Nazi hands during World War II.