9/27 Old Sturbridge Village

Sturbridge Village is a lot like our Greenfield Village in Michigan, except with a slightly earlier time frame--late 1700s and early 1800s for the most part.  Here is where you park if you have an RV and there is no RV parking.  Oh, how I miss the days when I had a handicap permit and parked right next to the door.  Of course my knees were a lot worse then.  In any case, I now get a lot of exercise parking at the far ends of parking lots!

I really had no plan for driving back to Ohio after New England and the Maritimes.  I had been thinking of spending a couple of days at Gettysburg, but then decided to spend more time in Massachusetts because I could always drive back to Pennsylvania another time.  So here I am at Old Sturbridge, which I had never been to before.

This is a Quaker meeting house.  Notice how small the windows were and how plain the architecture is.

 

This is a Puritan meeting house.  A bit fancier and more impressive.

  

 The inside of this Puritan building is also less plain.  Note the enclosed pews.

It was a beautiful cool but sunny day, so  perfect day for walking outside. 

 

This is an old store. All the buildings were moved here, by the way, just as they were at Greenfield Village.  And overall, this place is a little smaller than Greenfield Village.

This tiny building is a law office.  

And a parsonage.

Pretty basic kitchen, but the lady here was washing dishes after making a pie and baking it in a cast iron pot in the fireplace.  No kitchen stoves, even iron ones, in this period.

A tinsmith.

A small bank.  The Greek architecture is interesting.

There was no paper money in the colonial period, so they had only copper, silver, and gold coins that were stored in the safe you can see in the right back area of the office.

I suspect this banker's office is where you applied for a loan.    

The bank had iron shutters and an iron door for security. 

I enjoyed the printing office the most. The printer showed how they set type and printed sheets of various sizes. 

This is the composing room where they set the type. 

Can you imagine setting by hand the millions of letters needed for even a small book?

This was probably the most unique equipment. Slightly alcoholic cider was a popular drink because it was safer than water.  This "machine" chopped the apples.

This huge machine was the cider press.  It is hard to tell from the photo, but the beams on the top were two' high and about 8" wide, and made of a single tree trunk with no nails whatsoever. 

Because they had no screening, the chopped apples were placed on rye straw in layers.  When several layers were stacked, boards were placed on top and the huge screws turned with poles placed in the slots until they pressed the boards down on the apple pulp.

Can you imagine how they must have made those screws entirely by hand?  And even harder would have been to carve the screws in the top cross beam!!  I did not ask what wood they were made of, but it is obviously darker and probably harder.

And the other question is, who would want to drink the cider after it had gone through all the straw and dripped into a wooden trough at the bottom of this contraption???

I spent about three hours here, including having a snack, which is about my limit for walking around something.