Written by Emma and Brooks Morgan

A few weeks ago, Brooks Morgan and I traveled to Massachusetts to visit Sturbridge Village.

Left to right: Brooks Morgan, Junior Wonderland BookSaver Wills, Emma, and Junior Wonderland BookSaver Ella

Sturbridge Village is a reenactment town that contains houses, stores, and villagers that do the jobs that would have been done in the 1830s. There are potters, shoe makers, farmers, tin makers, women gardening, and just people walking through the streets. All of these people are in character and doing their jobs and answering questions so that visitors can see what it would have been like in that time period.

Wills churns butter

a man shears a sheep

There are also classes for students and we took Wood lore. We walked around the town learning about trees and special properties of these trees. One of our favorites was a tree that had a sap which closes and heals wounds, and we both put the sap on our minor scrapes on our fingers, and to our surprise, it actually did help heal. Our instructor used his knife to cut bark off a section of a tree, and showed us how to make a container to boil water in so that in the rare occasion that we were stuck in the woods alone, we would be able to collect water and prepare food. He used clips made out of sticks that he cut a slot in to hold the whole container together. We were both fascinated by this technique since he literally took a cylinder piece of bark and cut it and folded it into this container.

After our class we walked around the town doing activities. At the school house, we practiced walking on stilts and successfully managed doing about 10 steps.

We had a picnic lunch in the center of the town at the big green grass area, and afterwards went from house to house and shop to shop and going in to see rooms, furniture, and sometimes people inside who would tell us stories and answer questions. We learned a lot on this trip from the very informative people, and definitely enjoyed our trip to Sturbridge Village and look forward to going back.

Written by Emma and Brooks Morgan