Well, the seminar is really heating up, and the climate is following right along. Yesterday we took our trip to the Pope's Creek plantation located about 8 miles from Stratford in the Northern Neck (a region between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers). The home is birthplace of George Washington, and the National Park Service has established a working colonial plantation on the site. Employees and volunteers still farm, raise crops, and prepare food the same way as people did in the 18th century.
I was thinking the seminar personnel were going to put us to hard labor in the fields cultivating tobacco plants, but thankfully the experience was quite different. We were split up into groups of five and taken to different areas of the plantation to learn how things were done. The hands-on aspect of the adventure made it one of the most unforgettable trips I have ever taken.
First off was the outdoor kitchen. I was lucky to hit the kitchen first, as the roaring fire combined with the oppressive heat to thoroughly soak my clothes. Others had to live through the Hades-like conditions in the early afternoon, making their kitchen experience much worse. We prepared some biscuits, cut up a chicken, and sliced vegetables for the feast. Since there was only one fireplace and cooking over open flame is often hard to do, the cook asked me to shovel some wood coals onto the brick floor. These were to be used to cook the meal. And I thought being in the same room with the fire was hot � nothing close to having my face in the hearth shoveling glowing orange coals!
We then went to learn about spinning (which was completely over my head) and surveying. At the surveying station, we were regaled with the tedious methods used to measure out land and the ingenious methods colonial professionals had developed to make the job somewhat easier. Using advanced mathematics, they were able to extrapolate acreage from a relatively low number of actual measurements. That was, of course, much more difficult without the convenience of modern calculators.
At the sheep pen, I was charged with the task of shearing the wool off the animal's back using colonial-era scissors. They were remarkably easy to use, and the sheep laid on the ground (with the aid of two volunteers from the plantation) while I carefully removed the wool. Cutting the strands, I realized just how closely our ancestors lived to the real world of raw materials. I mean, today we think of clothes in the purely abstract sense of finished manufactured goods that come to us neatly pressed, perhaps with logos of some kind, and sized to fit us, never thinking about the incredible journey the fibers have made from their source to our backs. Colonial men and women could not thus separate themselves from the source.
The afternoon was spent on other field trips looking at the forests and beaches of the area to try to understand what they were like in colonial times. Interestingly, I learned that the Chesapeake Bay is overtaking shorelines at the rate of about one inch per year, a result of the continuing meltdown of the polar ice caps following the last ice age. The plantations of the 17th century, therefore, were considerably larger than they are today, and specialists are constantly finding colonial artifacts that wash up on shore.
So that's about it. I have to get to lunch, so I'll tell you more later.
Paul
Back to home page