Yay, history!

Sure, nature's great, in a too-cold/too-hot, too-dry/too-wet, insecty, sunburnedy, muddy, using-the-bathroom-in-the-woods and not-being-able-to-wash-your-hands kind of way. History, however, is exciting and thought-provoking without most of the physical discomfort. Growing up, I often enjoyed history from the comfort of my bedroom, reading favourite authors like Joan Aiken and leafing through an American history book my grandmother had given me.

In 1981 we took a family vacation to the States to visit relatives, etc. and while there we went to Colonial Williamsburg: my first taste of "living history." I was hooked.

Wig-maker and instrument-makers (dig those colonial spectacles!) at Williamsburg.

A few years later, I got hooked by an actual historian, and the adventures continued. We have taken many trips to the U.S., and we always get some history in. Our first intensive history vacation was in 1995, during which trip we visited New Harmony in Indiana (thus beginning our love affair with utopian communities), and New Salem (Land o' Lincoln), the Cahokia Mounds (Mississippians, AD 1250), and Nauvoo (where Mormons settled in 1839) in Illinois.

Why do I like historical sites? It's always cool to see how people did stuff:


The water cistern for the Pleasant Hill Shaker community in Kentucky. Water was piped into the buildings; the cistern was high enough to provide the pressure. A little flag bobbed in the top of the cistern so that they could see when the water level got too low. They refilled it with a pump powered by horses.


The laundry building at Pleasant Hill had this stove to keep multiple irons hot.


This is the seed-sorting room at Pleasant Hill. They sorted the seeds in those trays and then packaged and sold them.


This gadget is from the veterinary at the 1875 town of Walnut Hill (at the Living History Farms outside Des Moines, Iowa). You stood the horse or cow up against it, strapped it in, and then flipped the platform so that it was horizontal.


These are the gears at the carding mill at Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. The operator would move a lever upstairs above these gears; this would open the gates to let the water from the mill pond flow in to turn the gears. They had a grist mill and saw mill off the same pond. Too bad we didn't get a picture of the carding machine itself; it could card as much wool in about ten minutes as a person could card in a day. Very cool!

Sara is fond of kitchens. I'd better not go into too much detail, because no doubt she will want to do her own historical kitchen blog at some point. Lord knows she has enough pictures!

Summer kitchen at Pleasant Hill.


The kitchen of the house in Hannibal, Missouri where Mark Twain's family lodged after they fell on hard times.

We are both very moved by Civil War history. When Sara taught American history, her students could never quite believe it when she told them that Civil War casualties totalled more than the combined casualties of every other war that the U.S. was involved in before Vietnam. A very effective graphic portrayal of the casualties is shown at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Illinois: they have condensed the whole Civil War into four minutes, with the dates ticking by, the battle lines moving back and forth, and casualty tallies for both sides mounting by the second.


This is a house that was caught in the crossfire at the Civil War Battle of Franklin in Tennessee. In the space of only five hours, almost 2000 men were killed and almost 5000 wounded.


This is the back of Carnton, which was taken over as a field hospital after the Battle of Franklin. The family kept one room for themselves; in the rest of the house, every inch of floor space, including stairs and verandas, was covered with wounded men. There were so many that they covered the lawns outside as well. We saw the room on the second floor that was used as a surgery; it was in the front of the house. The operating table was next to the window for light and so that amputated limbs could be tossed out onto the wagon pulled up beneath the window; it was November 30 and it was pretty cold operating with the window open. The wooden floors still had bloodstains; next to where the operating table would have been you could see the stain left by a bloody bucket. (Sara and I became separated on the crowded tour; as this stain was being pointed out, I looked across the room in time to see her sliding down the wall. She does not like blood.)


This is the cemetery at Carnton Plantation. The family donated the land so that 1481 Confederate soldiers could be buried here after being disinterred from the farmer's field where they were originally buried. The lady of the house, Carrie McGavock, kept detailed records about each grave; families from all over the South wrote to her and visited the graves. Robert Hicks wrote a bestselling novel about McGavock and the Battle of Franklin in 2005: The Widow of the South.

Sometimes the history we find is personal history. My mother always visited this memorial whenever she went to Whitehall, Illinois to see her grandparents. The inscription reads: "In memory of Annie Louise Keller who saved sixteen children but sacrificed her own life when a tornado demolished Centerville School building April 19, 1927."


Other times the history we find is just by serendipity. Well, serendipity aided by a Smithsonian Guide to Historic America. These are out of print now but we have been collecting second-hand copies and now have seven volumes covering most of the states. These fantastic books are glossy with beautiful pictures and give historical overviews of regions as well as detailed information about historical sites in specific towns. While Sara drives (she has to drive because she cannot navigate worth a darn), I leaf through the Smithsonian Guide to see what interesting site might be just off the Interstate. Below are two places that we hadn't planned to visit, but we were going right past them, so why not?

Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. Maybe it's more of a natural thing, but since I had read a book about Stephen Bishop, a slave who was a guide there in the 1840s and 1850s, I count it as historical.


Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York. This was a piece of history I knew nothing about. It had a good museum.

Sometimes historical sites are just plain beautiful:

Hallway of a dormitory at Pleasant Hill. Men and women slept on opposite sides of the hall; the hallway was very wide on purpose, so that when men and women lined up to go downstairs every morning, they wouldn't touch.

On our recent trip to Massachussetts, we were lucky enough to visit not one but two living history sites, Plimoth Plantation (a recreation of the village where the pilgrims settled when they came over on the Mayflower, as it would have been in 1627, plus a Wamanoag village nearby) and Old Sturbridge Village (a village representing New England life from 1790 to 1840). Both had costumed interpreters, but Plimoth Plantation went one step further; its interpreters were 100% in character (except for the Wampanoag interpreters, all of whom were Native people; they were in costume but spoke as themselves so that they could explain Native history and culture to visitors). The in-character interpreters came complete with weird seventeenth-century English accents. It were werry werry difficult to understand them betimes. It were werry werry irritating by the end of the day, too.


This is the Mayflower II. The Mayflower had about 100 passengers, and man, it was not a big ship! These people had to spend most of their time below-decks with no windows. The part of the deck where they would have been allowed to walk every now and then was not werry big so it's unlikely they could come out werry often.

This is William Brewster, who had the least irritating accent of anyone in Plimoth. He also happened to be the eight-times-great-grandfather of our pal Murr, so we passed along greetings from her. That is, I passed along greetings. Sara hesitated because she didn't want to violate the Prime Directive. No harm was done, I think; Master Brewster seemed very tickled to hear from his eight-times-great-granddaughter, although he looks rather somber in this photograph.


History always gives one food for thought.
Stay tuned for historical fiction recommendations...