Heritage Festival

This past weekend, we went to the Ames Plantation Heritage Festival. But you already knew that if you saw yesterday’s Daily Photo, right? But I said it again, because I am going to talk about it some more.

The festival was all about showing how things were done back in the old days. And I thought it would be good for Jaylin to see some of that.

We went into a cabin that was maybe 12’ by 14’, if that much. There was a bed on one side, a fireplace on the other side with something cooking in a pot over it, and a table with a couple of chairs in the middle of the room. And that was the only room. I pointed out to Jaylin that the whole house was just slightly bigger than his bedroom. I didn’t even bother pointing out to him that there wasn’t a bathroom.

We saw a one-room school house. Jaylin thought that would be pretty cool to go to a school like that. He was particularly impressed with the wooden desks. I guess he wasn’t concerned about how hard those wooden seats would be after eight hours of sitting there.

We walked through a cotton field and picked our own cotton. And then we saw some of the large sacks that they would use for cotton picking. I reminded Jaylin that they didn’t always have big machines to go through and pick cotton, and that it used to be done by hand.

We saw Native Americans dancing, but Jaylin was more interested in the toy tomahawks and spears that they were selling.

We saw Belgian horses being used to load logs onto a wagon and then to pull the wagon. Those horses are still used around us, actually, because they can get into places that big trucks cannot fit into. And I think it is pretty cool that the old way is still the better way for that.

We saw a Civil War camp, and Jaylin was really impressed with the tents. They fired a cannon every half hour, which Jaylin didn’t like at all because he said it was too loud. And it was in fact loud. If you weren’t expecting it, the sound could make you jump.

We saw food being cooked in pots over an open fire. I reminded Jaylin that they used to have to cook most everything that way, because they didn’t have ovens or stoves or microwaves.

But the thing that got the most reaction out of Jaylin was when we saw a woman washing clothes using a tub and a washboard. Jaylin watched as she scrubbed one piece of clothing at a time on the washboard. I reminded him that they used to wash clothes that way before there were washing machines. He said, “Wow! It sure would take Mom a long time to wash all our clothes!”

At least he is always thinking of others.