We visited Massachusett’s Old Sturbridge Village in the fall, the perfect time to enjoy this open air museum.
The costumed employees and volunteers at Old Sturbridge harvest the land as the earlier settlers would have.
Apples, pumpkins and squash had been carefully collected, sometimes in unexpected free spaces. The settlers needed a dry area away from weather and animals, and floor space was a great (and, one hopes, temporary) storage spot.
Crops needed to be gathered while other jobs still had to be performed.
Men and boys set type and did the printing, while women stiched and bound books. Country printers also brought out pamphlets, broadsides, sermons, legal forms, advertisements, and public notices.
This bridge, one of the 12 remaining in Massachusetts, was saved from demolition to make way for a new highway in 1951. Fewer than 200 covered bridges still stand in New England.
Along with shoeing horses and making nails, the village blacksmith (often a town had more than one) produced items of metal needed for everyday life.
The Fenno House is Sturbridge’s oldest building.
Artisans on the Old Sturbridge Village grounds make traditional products in the old way. Many are available for sale in the gift shop. [1]
Old Sturbridge Village was born from the collective vision of a family. The three Wells brothers, Albert B., Joel Cheney, and Channing M. purchased David Wight’s farm with the vision of showing their collection in the context of a working village. The living museum received its first visitors on June 8, 1946. To date more than 21 million adults and children have visited the Village, and 250,000 people visit every year.
In memory of Laura Ingalls Wilder, February 7, 1867 – February 10, 1957
My books are Broken In: A Novel in Stories, Tsunami Cowboys, Grounded, and The Trail Back Out.
Broken In: A Novel in Stories was semifinalist for the international 2020 Hawk Mountain Short Story Collection Award and Finalist for Greece’s 2021 Eyelands Book of the Year Award (Short Stories). Tsunami Cowboys was longlisted for the 2019 ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Award. The Trail Back Out was American Book Fest 2020 Best Book Award Finalist: Fiction Anthologies, Runner-Up for the 2021 Top Shelf Award, 2021 IAN Book of the Year Award Short Story Collection Finalist, and awarded a 2021 Wishing Shelf Red Ribbon. The title story The Trail Back Out was longlisted for the 2021 ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story Award.
Click here for my author page to learn more about me and purchase my books.
Author Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882 in South Kensington, London, England. Her novels were some of the first to use stream of consciousness, and Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, her circle of family, friends and fellow artists, founded one of the most important movements in modern art and culture.
I’ve read my way through most of her work. Virginia Woolf has a delicious sense of humor (and irony!) and a keen sense of what it is to be a woman and an artist. I’ve reread her slim treatise A Room of One’s Own over and over, throughout my life.
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” Woolf tells us.
Indeed. In her honor, here is the post I wrote about hard lives after visiting an open-air museum in Latvia. – Jadi
Open-air museums are inappropriately named. For many people, Museum + History = Death by Excessive Yawning. Not me! A good open-air museum can transport me into other cultures and the past. I think a better name for such a site is ‘living museum’.
A favorite open-air museum is Neuhausen ob Eck (amusingly named ‘New Home on the Eck’), located not far from Tuttlingen and Konstanz in southern Germany. In the bee keeper’s house, I learned all about the world of bees. The German language holds bees in special regard. In German, the term for animals is die Bestie or Tiere, beasts. But Germans speak of the Bienenvolk, a hive or literally ‘the bee people’. In the Middle Ages, if the bee keeper died in the night someone was sent to the hives to whisper the news to the bees.
The bee keeper enjoyed a special status. Thanks to his bee family he produced wax candles for light, honey for food, and pollen products for medicine. [1]
Outdoor museums can teach with their simplicity. On our trip to Estonia and Latvia, we spent a day at Latvia’s Ethnographic Open-Air Museum on the shore of Lake Jugla. The spot is incredibly atmospheric.
It’s an easy bus ride from the capitol Riga to the museum. Go to my post The Art of Food and salivate over the delicious meals you can order in Baltic restaurants.
What I learned is that as recently as 100 years ago life here was a different story.
Existence was harsh and hard, like the overcast skies much of the day we visited. [2] Along with simple huts, the site includes windmills.
A store building is filled with dowry chests and traces of Latvia’s long history serving in the Hanseatic League.
My takeaway: How truly thin the veneer of prosperity is. Our sense of progress and the advance of civilization is so recent, and so young. I left grateful for the things I take for granted in my everyday life. In too many places in the world people still live without electricity, running water, or centralized heat.
In memory of Virginia Woolf, 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941
My books are Broken In: A Novel in Stories, Tsunami Cowboys, Grounded, and The Trail Back Out.
Broken In: A Novel in Stories was semifinalist for the international 2020 Hawk Mountain Short Story Collection Award and Finalist for Greece’s 2021 Eyelands Book of the Year Award (Short Stories). Tsunami Cowboys was longlisted for the 2019 ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Award. The Trail Back Out was American Book Fest 2020 Best Book Award Finalist: Fiction Anthologies, Runner-Up for the 2021 Top Shelf Award, 2021 IAN Book of the Year Award Short Story Collection Finalist, and awarded a 2021 Wishing Shelf Red Ribbon. The title story The Trail Back Out was longlisted for the 2021 ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story Award.
Click here for my author page to learn more about me and purchase my books.
We visited Massachusett’s Old Sturbridge Village in the fall, the perfect time to enjoy this open air museum.
The costumed employees and volunteers at Old Sturbridge harvest the land as the earlier settlers would have.
Apples, pumpkins and squash had been carefully collected, sometimes in unexpected free spaces. The settlers needed a dry area away from weather and animals, and floor space was a great (and, one hopes, temporary) storage spot.
Crops needed to be gathered while other jobs still had to be performed.
Men and boys set type and did the printing, while women stiched and bound books. Country printers also brought out pamphlets, broadsides, sermons, legal forms, advertisements, and public notices.
This bridge, one of the 12 remaining in Massachusetts, was saved from demolition to make way for a new highway in 1951. Fewer than 200 covered bridges still stand in New England.
Along with shoeing horses and making nails, the village blacksmith (often a town had more than one) produced items of metal needed for everyday life. The Fenno House is Sturbridge’s oldest building.
Artisans on the Old Sturbridge Village grounds make traditional products in the old way. Many are available for sale in the gift shop. [2]
Old Sturbridge Village was born from the collective vision of a family. The three Wells brothers of the American Optical Company in Southbridge, Massachusetts, Albert B., Joel Cheney, and Channing M. founded the massive collection that makes up Old Sturbridge. It is the world’s finest collection of rural New England artifacts. [3]
They purchased David Wight’s farm with the vision of showing their collection in the context of a working village. The living museum received its first visitors on June 8, 1946. To date more than 21 million adults and children have visited the Village, and 250,000 people visit every year.
NOTES: [2] The ruby red glass flask I purchased there winks at me from the window as I write this.
[3] Old Sturbridge Village began with a 1926 golf date cancelled due to Vermont rain: A.B. Wells went on an antiquing quest instead and became obsessed with collecting New England antiques and artifacts. Click here for more on the history of Old Sturbridge Village or for their website: www.osv.org/visit.
All photogaphs can be enlarged by simply clicking on the image. More of Uwe’s pictures from New England and his photography may be viewed at viewpics.de.
I love open air museums. Reading about history is nice, but when it’s three dimensional it comes to life for me. As a child, one of my family’s favorite destinations was Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. The village depicts life in historic New England from 1790-1840. Visitors stroll across 200 acres that contain 40 mostly original buildings and over 50,000 artifacts. It’s the northeast’s largest open air museum.
One year Uwe and I went to New England. I insisted that our trip include a visit to Old Sturbridge Village. In retrospect, it wasn’t just because the spot is so much fun, and it would be interesting (I hoped) for my European husband to learn about early New England history. A big part of the draw was my desire to revisit a favorite piece of my own childhood.
Revisiting places can be a letdown, but the autumn weather couldn’t have been more beautiful. The seasons were about to change and the leaves were coming into their glory. It was perfect.
The entry price is steep, $24 a person. But parking is free, and a second day’s visit is included. I was delighted that Uwe was willing to return the next day! [1]
Old Sturbridge has a large staff and lots of volunteer docents, folks who dress up in period costumes and chat with visitors. These volunteers go through a training period first and either demonstrate crafts (the blacksmith) or share knowledge (the bank clerk). All of them are enthusiastic and fun to talk with.
Only 25% of those first store patrons could afford to pay cash. Most customers bartered for store goods. The store owner kept a careful ledger of customers’ names, purchases, and what they owed. The young woman behind the counter explained that while ‘her’ father would have run the store, it was likely that a daughter would drop her other duties to help out if she was needed.
Goods from around the world as well as local products were for sale even two hundred years ago.
Tinplated sheet iron was imported from Great Britain and formed in New England tin shops.The Old Sturbridge Village gift store has handmade items such as dippers, lanterns, etc. for sale.
The bank’s single employee was the cashier, open for business in the morning. Afternoons were spent doing paperwork and bookkeeping. This terrific volunteer regaled us with his knowledge and said that yes indeed, the bank clerk would have sat at the window waiting for business and chatting with people passing by…
A farm family drank about 300 gallons of hard cider each year. Hic!
This is the only New England water-powered carding mill still in existence. It did a day’s work of hand-carding wool in a mere 20 minutes.
Part 2 will be posted shortly.
NOTES: [1] Of course, for Uwe a big draw was the unique photo ops…
All photogaphs can be enlarged by simply clicking on the image. More of Uwe’s pictures from New England and his photography may be viewed at viewpics.de.