Come sit with me a while in the 1800's

This is a little bit of our day at the Genesee Country Museum on Laura Ingalls Wilder day. We had a great time. There were many hands on activities that we did. Although I did not get pictures of everything we did I did capture many of them. There were SO many people there it was difficult to get a spot to do the activity let alone take pictures. You will see that in many of the pictures we did get.

The activities we did were: Making soap and sifting ashes, pounding corn, rope making, wooden peg making, finding a button in a haystack, making a corn husk doll, weaving straw hats, wheat threshing, milk a cow, shelf paper cutting, churning butter, making popcorn, sawing logs, pickling, wool dyeing,laundry, stuffing a mattress, games from the 19th century, kneading bread, churning ice cream, nine patch quilt square, button bracelet.

As you enter the village, the first place you come to is the toll house. This building was built in 1850 it was near Lima, New York. As you came to this toll house you were to pay much like you do today to drive on toll roads. Sorry this is an old picture but I forgot to take one this weekend. As you enter the toll house you start smelling all of the fires used through out the village.

Our next stop was seeing how Laura would of done the laundry. The kids were very excited to see how this was done. Katrina even asked if we could do our laundry this way from now on. Sure I said you are in charge of it. That lasted about 1 minute. But how simple this time was. It would be fine in the summer but winter would be a different story.

This is Karen Grassle, who played "Ma" on the series Little House on the Prairie. She is a very soft spoken woman. She is kind and down to earth. Although, she admits to being a feminist, I really enjoyed listening to her speak. She talked for about 20 minutes about how she was cast into the roll of Ma. She was asked to come in for an interview with Michael Landon to read for him. After she did he was very excited to give her the roll right on the spot. Then she opened up the floor and took questions from people. Some questions she graciously refused to answer, but I do not blame her because I couldn't believe someone would ask her, "Who did you not like on the set of Little House?" She also said she was nothing like Ma, but she does have the grace of her!

This woman is a direct descendant of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her Great Grandfather was Charles Ingalls. She just happened by the museum on a bus tour the day before and one of her family members brought her back for the day. Wonderful lady.

Next it was onto making ice cream. The children were able to turn the crank and see how the ice cream was formed. Then we were able to sample it. But because of NYS laws we had to sample some made in the museum kitchen by "professionals". It still tasted very good!!

We then moved on to the baseball field. Where we enjoyed a 19th century baseball game. It was great because Friday nite we went to a modern baseball game with our church. Andrew loved watching it and seeing how different it was from today's baseball. One thing he noticed was that they didn't use gloves in the 19th century because the ball was much softer. They also pitched underhand, like in softball of today. This is a threshing machine, much like the one use in "Little House in the Big Woods" Laura Ingalls Wilder's first book. Except the one in the book used horses. This one used man power. Up on top of the "wagon" was a type of treadmill. The man would climb up on top and start walking backwards, this moved the threshing machine to separate the wheat from the stalk. Then they collected under neath the machine and you then had to toss them to separate the wheat berries. Whew! What work it must of been just to be able to grind the wheat into flour.

This is Hannah and I working on our corn husk doll. It was so muggy and hot and here we were shoulder to shoulder with many people trying to make these dolls. But Hannah had fun doing this! LOL!

This is a picture of green beans drying in the pioneer cabin. I love seeing all the fresh vegetables drying this time of year at the museum. From veggies to herbs, the smells at the museum are just wonderful. I could stay there forever!!

There are SO many more pictures, but I need to get some work done. So I promise I'll post them later! If you are ever in the Rochester, NY area please do not miss this museum!