Saturday September 26, 2009

 

 

Mystic Seaport

Mystic, Connecticut

Friday, September 18

 

 

 I was looking forward to our “slow trip” through Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and southern Maine, because the summer has been anything but a “slow trip” for me. 

Cerwin is an “interstate kind of guy” who likes to get from point “a” to point “b” as quickly as possible, so spending most of Friday on interstates (driving from Pennsylvania to Mystic, Connecticut) was just fine with him.  

I enjoyed the scenery and read a few secondhand magazines I purchased at our local Jubilee Store a few weeks ago.

 

 

 It was a perfect afternoon to enjoy Mystic Seaport.  The sun was warm and the sea breeze a bit cool.

 

 

 We spent three hours walking through the re-created 19th-century seafaring village – and could have easily spent three more hours there.  The entrance fee of twenty-plus dollars for adults gives you a two-day pass.

 

 

Our first stop was Buckingham-Hall House where the family of William Hall Sr., a New York import merchant, made their home in the 1830s.

When construction of a new highway bridge across the Connecticut River threatened this structure with demolition in1951, Mystic Seaport agreed to preserve it. The house was shipped to its present location by barge. 

 

 

 The kitchen is still the site for daily open-hearth cooking demonstrations, and the kitchen garden in the back is the source for much of the fresh produce.

  

 

 This food was removed from the hearth shortly before we arrived.

 

 

 She explained a bit about the house and some of the things in the kitchen.

 

 

 The rest of the house was a self-guided tour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 We enjoyed pretty fences and flowers…

 

 

 …and walked over leaf-covered, stone-lined walkways – entering some buildings, and just enjoying the exterior of others.

 

 

 Each building is numbered, and if open, a sign like this is near the entrance.

 

 

 During the heyday of Mystic’s shipbuilding activity in the 1850s and of a generation thereafter, the Greenmanville Seventh-Day Baptist Church was the focus of the town’s considerable Seventh-Day Baptist community.

 

 

  The congregation, which was an offshoot of the Greenman brothers’ own home parish in Westerly, Rhode Island, built the church about 1851.  The original site is adjacent to the present main entrance to Mystic Seaport. 

 

 

I’ll take you over some pathways again tomorrow night, and show you a few more interesting things in the seaport.