You can go back again...but should you?

A poopy time at Old Sturbridge Village

Words and photography by Sean Barney

There are a lot of things that I found boring pre-COVID that are, now, fascinating to me. Walking in the open air, appreciating the leaves changing colors, fixing my house, mowing the lawn, and walking to CVS are all much more fun to me than they were in the past. However, Old Sturbridge Village is not one of them.

I knew when I was trying to get my seven-year-old excited about it, the morning before we drove an hour into antiquated boredom, that it was not going to be much fun. “What are we going to do there, daddy? Why are we going there? I think I’d rather stay home and play Mario Kart.” I didn’t have any answers for him. I would have rather stayed home and played video games, too.

The best thing about Old Sturbridge Village is that it is very easy to get to from Cambridge/Boston. You get on the Pike and then turn right. You’re there.

The website “The History List” says, “Old Sturbridge Village traces its beginnings to the remarkable collection amassed by industrialists Albert B. and J. Cheney Wells of neighboring Southbridge. The Wells family brought together a wealth of early New England artifacts, including tools, utensils, furniture, glassware, and clocks. The family later dedicated itself to the idea of displaying the collections within a working village, where visitors could better understand how the items were originally crafted and used.

Old Sturbridge Village first opened to the public on June 8, 1946. In the more than 60 years since more than 21 million adults and children have visited the Village, and the museum has attained international recognition for its innovations in research and education.”

I’m not sure how these things are ranked, but I saw no innovation. It felt like a long walk to the gift shop. We parked easy enough. Mostly because there is a limit to how many people can be in the museum at once. I made reservations the night before. It's required. You might be able to do it the day of but make sure you have it in writing before you go. They do not take walk-ins. I would recommend starting your tour at the café. Grab a hot cider filled with Fireball or bring your own favorite adult beverage into the museum. They don’t check backpacks.

You never get the feeling that you’re in an old-timey town. It very much feels like a museum even though it’s outdoors. You can’t touch anything. I completely understand this because of the very real and scary COVID-time that we live in, but it is quasi-open, and they are still taking thirty of your hard-earned American dollars. I thought it would be the safest place to take my family; open-air, easy to social-distance, and give us a bit more exercise than the MFA. While this was definitely true, I wondered what cost it would be to our mental health as the afternoon progressed.

On this dreary Fall day, we found our way to the town square easily. After trying to have our e-tickets scanned on the way in (bring printed tickets if you don’t want potential virus carriers groping your phone), we found ourselves at the Friends Meeting House. There were no friends there. It was a house that had pews in it. Everything in the entire museum is roped off, but you can peer in the doorways two at a time!

Although you expect some kind of signage or reference to show you how to approach the village and which path takes you through the history of its founding and architecture, there is none. So, we keep walking in one direction and find ourselves at the Center Meeting House or, the church (thanks Google). With no tour guides to explain anything to me, I start to make up my own tour, “This is the place unpopular people came to gather. The people who presented congeniality and openness would meet at the first stop on our tour.” This meeting house is much bigger than the one where friendly people meet (The Friends House). Continuing my self-guided tour, I expound, “A little-known fact about the years between 1782 and 1837 is that most people didn’t like each other. This created a need for the much larger and more accurately named, Center Meeting House. It wasn’t that the population had grown so much as the growing disdain and contempt for one’s fellow man created a greater need for physical distance between families sitting in hand-carved spacious pews. Sound familiar? Perhaps. While smallpox epidemics kept popping up in Boston, Sturbridge was mostly unscathed. Moving on…”

There is a historical interpreter working on the loom at the Fenno House textile exhibit. She is explaining how they make red dye out of crushed beetles. I’m a bit dismayed at her modern English-speaking style as I had my heart set on hearing terrible faux-British accents. However, my attention is peaked. There is an older gentleman seated on a bench, across from this mistress of information. He is with his grandchildren. He is monopolizing most of the Q&A time. Before I can ask which Beatles they used to make the dye – John, Paul, George, or Ringo – she has gotten up to go on break. My excellent “dad joke” is left to die in my mouth.

The “Knight Store” was an expected disappointment. You cannot purchase lances or shields or knights. The store is closed due to COVID. It is named after Asa Knight who was never knighted. In fact, he never even lived in Sturbridge Village (ref). The house was built in Vermont in 1810 and moved to OSV in 1972. This, for me, was part of the let-down to the whole experience. I love archeology of any kind and after looking up most of the buildings we visited, I realized that this wasn’t an archeological site, at all. To its credit, the museum never claims to be. Almost everything on the 200 acres the complex takes up has been brought in from neighboring towns and states. It is literally a museum. It is something to keep in mind and understand when visiting. I found out post-visit.

Our three-person tour ambles slightly uphill to the District School and its communal outhouse. Three holes are side-by-side in a shed. For my son (Simon) and I, this was one of the highlights. Imagining our entire family pooping next to each other or fellow students, before toilet paper was invented, made us crack up. We then made sure to get pictures of all the different out-houses in the village. Poop is always funny. It brought us smiles during an otherwise grey and drizzly day.

For very visceral poop smells, we went downslope a bit to the working farm. Swine are often defended as being very clean animals and that their reputation as being filthy and smelly is unwarranted. Somebody should hand these pigs a warrant. While my wife can stare at and take pictures of any non-human for hours on end, Simon and I quickly made our way down to the farmhouse.

My son with his “city-boy” hand over his masked nose and I, pretending to be a fastidious father, took a deep breath when we reached the window of a woman cooking roast lamb and root-vegetables. Unfortunately, there were none of the great cooking smells present that we were anticipating. This was prop-food. Although it looked real enough in appearance, the lamb was prepared as recently as yesterday (probably longer ago) and the veggies looked like they were about to turn, no kitchen alchemy was occurring. The woman was poking a dying to dead fire and putting the food in and out of a pot. It was like one of the glitches in West World.

My son and I watch a bull defecate effortlessly by the vacant tannery. My wife catches up to us as I remark, “It looks like the tanner got the horns.” We make our way to the “River Walk” as I explain to my son the joke, having only given him the punchline.

To get to the “River Walk” we have to go through an old-fashioned covered bridge. A trolley drawn by two horses is ahead of us. It moves with the speed of maple syrup flowing down a tree’s knobby trunk on a glacial December day. With every clop, clop, clop – there is a plop, plop, plop. I look down in resignation, noticing the landmines at our feet. “At least they only eat oats and hay,” I remark as we trod inevitably forward. It starts to rain a touch heavier as we reach “The River Walk.”

This path is meant to take us on a scenic stroll along the Quinebaug River. The Quinebaug River was a food source for many of the settlers in the area. It travels 69 miles through Connecticut and into Long Island Sound. As the rain and mud start to unbalance me, I wonder if I would rather be in Hartford, right now. No. Still no. To stop me from slipping further I grab onto a signpost that reads, “The Quinebaug River Boat rides offered 12-3 p.m. $3.” I look up to see a dilapidated dock jutting dangerously out of the water. It doesn’t appear that any kind of vessel has found safe harbor here in quite some time. We manage another 5 minutes past the landing and . . . “the River Walk” has ended. For those of you playing along at home, it has probably taken you longer to read my prose than the much-anticipated walk took us to complete.

The Sawmill was still in, somewhat, working order. The extensive drought this summer had rendered its water-power impotent. Simon and I stood inside the mill looking down at where the halved logs would have splashed into the waiting river below. We knew what we had really missed out on this summer. A trip to Six Flags New England! Oh, to ride that Flume again and get soaked by water with normal germs in it. Realizing that we would have to wait, at least, another year before our amusement park dreams would be fulfilled, we headed to the gift shop.

The gift shop was unremarkable. It offers a plethora of toys that went out of style for a reason. On sale were the high-fructose, diabetes-inducing sugar bombs that are advertised as “old-fashioned candy,” and corny tee-shirts and sweatshirts that will end up in a Goodwill store before a year’s time.

If you go, go with lower expectations than I had, you could be alright. It is what it says it is. Nothing more. Nothing less. Please, even if the COVID-19 virus is a long-distant nightmare when you go, do yourself a favor and wear a mask.

References

“Old Sturbridge Village.” The Asa Knight Store, https://www.osv.org/building/asa-knight-store-2/.

“Old Sturbridge Village.” https://www.thehistorylist.com/venues/old-sturbridge-village-sturbridge-massachusetts