Frommer's 500 Places to Take Your Kids Before They Grow Up by Holly Hughes

Author:Holly Hughes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780470474051
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2010-03-17T10:00:00+00:00

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Old Sturbridge Village

Portrait of Young America

All ages • Sturbridge, Massachusetts, USA

Let's be honest: Old Sturbridge Village is a fabricated tourist attraction, a village composed of early-19th-century buildings moved here from other locations. The costumed docents around the site are only pretending to follow the pursuits of 170 years past. But Sturbridge Village is a careful, thoughtful re-creation, and my family was immediately engrossed in its depiction of an ordinary farm village, illustrating a period of time they haven't studied to death.

Only 1 of the more than 40 restored structures in the complex stands on its original site—the Oliver Wight House, now part of the Old Sturbridge Village Motor Lodges (see below). The rest were transported here from as far away as Maine. But all are authentic buildings and they represent the living quarters and places of trade and commerce of a rural settlement of the 1830s. What struck us, in comparison to other historic re-creations, was that by the 1830s a more diversified economy was beginning to emerge; not only are there shops for such traditional trades as blacksmithing and printing and coopering, but there are a shoe shop and a tinsmith's shop (tin ware had become a popular commodity by the era). At the edge of the village sits an industrial area with a gristmill, a sawmill, even a carding mill for the nascent textile industry. A professional class is starting to emerge by this time, too, with a lawyer setting up his tiny white frame office downtown and a country bank that issued its own currency to farmers, replacing the old barter system for local transactions. There's both a Quaker meetinghouse and a regular Congregational meetinghouse, showing the growth of religious diversity.

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