Family Fun at Old Sturbridge Village

At Christmastime last year, I purchased tickets for my family to attend Old Sturbridge Village. (I'm big on buying "experience gifts" rather than "things.") Having been there twice before, I thought the family would enjoy going, and I was right! We all held onto our tickets until the last day of school and chose a Friday in June to go together. It would be Lewie and me, our cousin Vincent and his wife Jamie, and our cousin Billy with his daughter Crystal. Vincent, Lewie, Crystal, and I had been to Old Sturbridge Village before; however, it would be a new experience for Jamie and Billy. Even for Vincent, it felt like a new experience since he hadn't been there in nearly 40 years--back when he was in grade school. 

In short, Old Sturbridge Village is an outdoor history museum that models a rural New England town from the 1830s.  It includes more than 40 historic buildings, such as a mercantile, church, bank, meeting house, water-powered mill, houses, and tradeshops. The museum features costumed docents throughout its 240-acre property, depicting everyday life in the town. Some docents are farmers, riding up and down the streets in their horse-drawn wagons; others are making shoes, smelting iron, sculpting clay pots, or selling goods in the mercantile. (For any "Little House on the Prairie" fans, this is the place to be!) It was a time that was certainly harder — void of modern medicine and today's electronic luxuries — but also a time when family and life's simple pleasures mattered.

Here are some pictures of our fun excursion. P.S. We visited while Old Sturbridge Village was displaying a unique public art event called the CowParade. The CowParade is just that--life-size, fiberclass cow sculptures painted by local artists, which are later auctioned off to support local charities. We had a lot of favorite cows! 

In the 1800s and 1900s, shepherds would walk on stilts to cross marshy or swampy areas to avoid sinking into the ground or getting bitten by venomous snakes. The stilts also gave shepherds a higher position to protect their livestock from harm.

(Now that I am taking college classes again to earn my Doctorate of Education, it took a while for me to finish this post, but I'm so glad I did. A lot has changed since June. I started school, my cousins Vincent and his wife Jamie moved from Connecticut to Delaware, and of course, the kiddos [Lewie and Crystal] have started a new school year. Truly, this trip is a snapshot in time. Now that Vincent and Jamie are living out of state again, I don't know when we'll have a family trip like this going forward...

As they say near the end of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it!"