Posts Tagged ‘history’

Life

Time Travel Weekend

I’ve started trying to explore my new area. This weekend, I walked downtown to go to the farmers market and an art fair, but my big expedition was to the Frontier Culture Museum. This is a big, open-air exhibit on the edge of town that showcases the history of this region, from back when it was the American frontier. They’ve relocated actual historic structures and set up small farms for different historical areas. There’s a Native American farm, a cabin from the 1700s, an 1820s farmhouse, an 1850s farmhouse, a frontier schoolhouse, and an African-American church from around the end of the Civil War. It’s basically an opportunity to travel in time.

But the museum also gets into the cultures of the people who settled here, so there’s an Old World section with an Irish tenant farm from the early 1700s, a German farm, an English farm from the 1600s, and a West African farm. Part of these exhibits is not only the culture of the people who came from these places, but the reasons people left those places. For instance, the English farmhouse is a place a yeoman farmer would have lived, and that sort of person wouldn’t have had a reason to leave, but it was the kind of thing tenant farmers and laborers without land might have aspired to, so they’d have taken the opportunity to become indentured workers in the Virginia colony so that after their indenture time was up, they’d have their own land and would be yeoman farmers (and when the big landowners realized that they were going to run out of land if they kept having to give it to their workers, they turned to slavery for labor).

They grow flax there, so they can demonstrate the process of what it takes to process it into linen, and they raise sheep that they shear and then demonstrate wool processing. I also saw some cattle, pigs, chickens, and goats (and a barn cat).

They were doing a special Memorial Day event, so they had some historical reenactors and special experts on hand doing presentations. I went to the session a member of the Shawnee tribe did about Native American life in this area. They also had a smith working in the 18th century Irish forge, a demonstration of muskets by Revolutionary War reieactors, and a reenactment of the Enclosure Riots in England in the early 1600s.

A half-timbered English farm building from the 16th century, with reenactors wearing costumes from the early 1600s standing in front.
The English farm at the Frontier Culture Museum., just before they reenacted the Enclosure Riots.

There were some other activities, but I spent a lot of time in the forge, since one of the main characters in the next Rydding Village book is a smith, and I had to pet the dog the Shawnee man had because he looked so much like a dog I used to have (even acted exactly like my dog used to act when someone petted him) and I chatted with him for a while. I didn’t take a weapon and join in on breaking down the enclosures (I figured I’d let the kids have that fun), but I did watch and join in on the songs and cheers they taught us.

Actually, the Old World farmhouses were a lot like what I imagine for some of the houses in Rydding (though I picture more of the Cotswolds honey-colored stone), so the whole thing was very useful for giving me mental images and sensory details. I guess the excursion counted as work.

I ended up getting an annual pass because this is the kind of place you can’t really see all of in one visit, and they have a lot of really interesting sounding special events throughout the year. It’s also just a pleasant place to go walking, with some footpaths through wooded areas, and it’s near the Aldi, so I could pop by for a walk when I go grocery shopping. The history is one of the reasons I wanted to move to this area, so I’m going to have to explore all the historic sites. Later in the year, once I’m more settled, I’ll have to head to the coast and check out Williamsburg. I also need to plan a visit to DC and to see Mount Vernon, plus they’re getting pandas back at the National Zoo.

My Books

The World of Rebel Mechanics

Since I’m losing my cable on Thursday, I’ve been frantically trying to watch all the stuff I’ve recorded on my DVR. When something came on that I thought might make good reference material for a book I might work on, I recorded it, and I was planning to watch those things when time came around to work on that book. But now I’m having to watch all of it and take notes, and hope I can still remember it all when it comes time to write that book (or hope I can get some of those programs through other means, like through the library or some streaming service).

And, wouldn’t you know, tonight something that would make an excellent reference for a Rebels book is going to be on PBS, and recording it would do me no good since I have to get rid of the recorder in a couple of days. So I guess I’ll be watching and taking notes.

The program is an American Experience episode about the Gilded Age, which is the period in which the Rebels books are set. I chose that period to base my steampunk world on because of all the things that it looks like this program will highlight. There was a massive inequality of resources, with a few extremely rich people, a small middle class, and a vast number of people barely getting by and pretty much being held back by the extremely rich people who owned most of the factories and other means of employment and who kept wages so ridiculously low that their employees didn’t stand a chance. Poor people lived in terrible slums that were breeding grounds for diseases while rich people owned mansions on Fifth Avenue and spent millions of dollars throwing parties. It’s actually kind of a miracle that there wasn’t a revolution during that time, since the number of poor people vastly outnumbered the wealthy.

I thought that made it a good setting for a book that moved the American Revolution to a later time. In my world, it’s magic that gives the upper class a monopoly on power and production, and the revolution is as much against the British Empire as it is against the economic inequality, but all of it comes into play.

I don’t know if I’ll learn that much from watching this show, since I did a ton of research before writing these books, but if you want some good visuals to go with the books and some broader info about the world that inspired the books — or if you’re a teacher or librarian wanting to work these books into your curriculum — this would be worth a watch tonight (and they usually have these episodes available on the PBS web site for a week or two).