The Old Sturbridge Village Farms & Mills

The colonial farmer plowed with a pair of oxen. I recently found out that oxen are gelded bulls. The farmer typically would have 8 acres a year under the plow. It takes about one day to plow an acre that way. I would have thought they would have had much more land in production than that!













The Blacksmith Shop:

The former smithy was a wooden building which burnt down some years ago. They searched New England for a stone smithy of the right age and moved it to this setting.

Female Blacksmiths were rare to nonexistant in colonial society, yet now the majority of blacksmiths in this country are women. The smith at Mystic seaport told me that the premier blacksmith in the world right now is a woman.




The Sawmill:

The sawmill from across the mill pond