Monday, January 03, 2011

Sunday’s Staycation

I had the last two weeks off from my internship and school, so to end my vacation I went up to Old Sturbridge Village. For those who do not know, Old Sturbridge Village is a recreation of an 1800s New England village complete with colonial interpreters.

As you enter the village through the visitor’s center, you are greeted with an old country lane…

I took the left fork in the road and went first to the glass exhibit and the firearms buildings, this is the house that the firearm exhibit is located. Next to those buildings is the cider mill with its apple orchards.

Cider was one of the main staples for the colonials or more precisely, hard cider. Walking down the lane there is a print shop, which I stopped in to talk to the printer who was printing up the parsons Sunday sermon about the evils of the world. Just past the print shop was the village green on the Salem Towne House that was moved to the museum from Charlton, Massachusetts, it was built in 1796.
In the pen were two young bulls butting heads…
Looking out from the front yard you can see the church at the end of the town green.
From there I went down to the lower village, through the covered bridge and to the town sawmill, gristmill and carding mill.


To the left of the gristmill you can see the building where the carding mill is in.
This is the sluice for the gristmill, looking out the mill’s window.
Also down in the lower village is a blacksmith shop. The ringing of hammering was coming from the shop, so I stopped in to see what he was doing and he told me that he was making horseshoes for the town wagon.
Then I wandered up to the potter’s shop where he said that he was making coffee mugs for an order that he had and that they would fire up the kiln in the spring to "fire" them.
They also have a number of farm animals at the village, including sheep and chickens.

While you walk around the village, you see colonial interpreters walking back and forth to their shops.

When you go inside the buildings, you see the way they lived and many of the machines that that had back in the 1800s
I was glad that I went when I did; the weather for the second day of January was in the mid-forties and was overcast. In addition, there were no crowds and I could take all these photo without any 21st century tourist in the background. I was usually they only one talking to the interpreters or in the buildings. I have passed Old Sturbridge Village many times in the summer and it was packed with tourist from all over the country, but yesterday there were only a couple of dozen cars in the parking lot.

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