Blast from the Past - Layers of History

Sorry I'm a day late... yesterday wound up being pretty busy as it was our (supposedly) first day of school, first day of gym class, and then we had dinner plans in the evening.

One more set of pictures from that family vacation several years ago!  The town in Manitoba where my mom grew up has a living history museum that I remember visiting often as a kid.  So on this particular trip, my parents and I took the kids to see the museum for themselves.  There's layers of history and memories here - the museum itself captures the past, focusing mainly on the 1800s.  My own grandparents were involved in building and running this museum, and my mom and I have memories of that.  I fondly remember many hours spent here when I was a child.  Now my kids have visited, and I have memories of taking them, and I hope they will have happy memories of the experience too.

My grandma sometimes worked in the kitchen there, preparing delicious "Mennonite food" for the guests.  (The whole term "Mennonite food" is something our family has often debated - because the food is really unique to the German/Dutch Mennonite people that emigrated from colonies in Eastern Europe, not Mennonites in general.  There's no such thing as "Presbyterian Food" or "Methodist Food", is there?  And I don't imagine that folks in South America that belong to a Mennonite church eat the same foods, do they?  Sorry - that was a tangent...) My grandpa also volunteered at the museum, and constructed some of the household pieces.  His brother was a blacksmith and worked the forge at the museum.  I remember how I liked to hang out at the blacksmith shop and watch Uncle Jake and the other men at work, and I had quite a collection of horseshoe nail rings that he made.

Both of my grandfathers (Cor. P. Doerksen and Jacob W. Friesen) and some of my great uncles (only Mr Stoesz and Mr Fast are not related to me) actually BUILT that shop.



The museum also features a large working windmill -



and a large collection of farm equipment, which I didn't take pictures of, but some of it is kept in that red barn.  My dad and Spencer are shooting the breeze while waiting for the threshing demonstration.



They were butchering the day we went, so we also watched as volunteers (including one of my mom's cousins) made sausage.  Sorry, no pictures.

Like many living history museums, horse-drawn wagon rides are offered -

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="240" caption="Pleeeeeeeeease? Can we ride?"][/caption]

and we couldn't say no to this face!







I made sure we spent some time in the one-room schoolhouse, just to make sure we could count this as a school trip! ;-)





(yes that is ME! Rare photo of yours truly)

And this is quite possibly my favorite school picture EVER of Harrison and Spencer -



and pretty accurately captures my own reaction to the words "public school"

This multi-layered trip back in time is linked to Debbie's Digest where you can see other Blasts from the Past, and join us!