At play on Early American Day
BRADY TWP — Wood smoke rose into a bright blue sky and Irish folk music drifted across the grounds as the Old Stone House was transported to the Colonial era Saturday.
During Early American Day from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., visitors were invited to view history brought to life as volunteers made candles, churned butter, spun wool, cooked in an open hearth and baked in a clay oven.
There were tours of the stone house itself and chances for visitors to try their hand at ax throwing and Colonial era games.
Slippery Rock University students Samantha Burkhouse of Bradford and Shelby Bosworth of Beaver Falls were helping children make candles.
“You have to melt the wax on the fire and then let it cool off a little before dipping a wick into it,” said Burkhouse. “It's a pretty tedious process.”
Bosworth said making candles “is a layering process. You keep dipping a cotton wick, let the wax set and do it again. Eventually, it will look like a candle.”
The two students are also docents at the Stone House from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays from May through August when the house is open to visitors.
Volunteer Stan Malecki's demonstration was just as time-consuming but much more edible than candlemaking.Malecki was handing out samples of bread he'd baked in the wood-burning cob oven he and other volunteers had painstakingly built on the grounds.“A cob oven is made out of clay. I'd say it's authentic to those used in pioneer life,” said Malecki.Malecki said volunteers began building the oven in 2014 shaping it out of layers of sand, clay and straw around a sand mold.The finished oven was placed on a foundation and covered with a roof.“When you get that thing going it stays up to 900 degrees,” said Malecki. “It takes about two and a half hours to get it (the heat) up to speed.“When you bake bread, you rake out the coals and bake the bread just from the heat of the oven,” he said.
Spinning yarn out of wool also takes time, according to Jean Chestnut of Kittanning who was powering a castle-type spinning wheel with her feet.“We were here at Christmas time to volunteer and decided to volunteer again. We let the kids weave,” said Chestnut.A lot of things can be spun into yarn, said Chestnut, such as wool from camels, llamas and yaks.But our colonial ancestors made their clothes from yarn spun from flax, she said.“It's estimated that it would take a third of an acre of flax to make enough material to make a shirt,” said Chestnut.And spinning that yarn usually took place at the end of a woman's day filled with cooking, working in the gardens and fields, and tending children. “In the evenings, they would do their spinning,” Chestnut said.
