September 18, Greenfield Village -- light and flowers

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There are gardens everywhere in Greenfield Village. Many are ornamental, and many others are kitchen gardens, with the sorts of vegetables, herbs, and fruits that would have been grown by the original inhabitants of the houses.

Raspberries.





At this point we decided it was time for lunch. We ate in the Eagle Tavern, which is from 1850 in Clinton, Michigan. It was on the main road from Detroit to Chicago, and hosted travelers on their way to California and other parts west.

The menu "reflects both the seasonal nature and availability of foods in mid-19th-century Michigan and offers a selection of both alcoholic and temperance drinks of the period."

I enjoyed my "savory noodles with greens and herbs" -- broad egg noodles, with kale and cherry tomatoes. I'm told the pan-fried trout was very good, as was the chicken fricassee and the "salmagundi" which was cold cheese and sausage (though the sausage was almost certainly quite "period" and was difficult to manage without a sharper knife than was provided).

This is my lemonade (which was very nice), with the straw-size hollow pasta they gave us to drink with. Seems strange, that pasta would be common, and that hollow pasta of this length would be common, 150 years ago in Michigan, but what do I know?



We enjoyed lunch. The staff is in period clothing, and "the wife of the proprietor" chatted with us briefly, inquiring of the lone man in our party if he was delivering mail-order brides to California. [snort] Yeah, probably. [snort] I'm the youngest of us, and am old enough to qualify for the only-for-those-of-a-certain-age extra retirement-oriented savings at work............. Those Californians would have been pretty disappointed to see "brides" the age of their grandmothers, I bet................

It was a fun and interesting place to eat, and I enjoyed my lunch. I'd happily eat there again.



Moving right along.....



One of the buildings we toured was a boarding house. Running a boarding house was one of the few respectable jobs available for women in the 19th century. This house had six bedrooms for the men who boarded there (from 8 to 16 of them at once!). All the work was done by the owner, her daughter, and one (female) employee.

They did well; this house was electrified.

We were told that there was 150 volts of direct current running through those wires, and that if you touched them both, you were fried.

Hmmm. Scary.





These replica light bulbs are made by a craftsman who blows the glass, evacuates the air, installs the filament, etc. They cost $100 each (or was it $150; I may be confusing the price with the volts.......). In any case, they are run on 7.5 volts of alternating current at present, and put out about as much light as a nightlight. This makes the bulbs last much longer than running them as hot as they would have run when the house was originally electrified. (And is much safer! Touching the wires now "would give you a very mild tingle.")



I don't want to run a boarding house......



We looked at many gardens, as two of our party of four are avid gardeners. It was great, walking around with them, as they knew the identity of nearly everything I wondered about.

This one I knew by myself -- amaranth.







Straw flowers.







Marigolds.





Neither gardener was close enough to ask when I saw this......





Another everlasting.





The interesting stem-age is that of the everlasting in the prev.





Calendula. We saw lots of this. It was in the apothecary's garden, as well as in several of the ornamental gardens.





Green-eyed susan?







Hare's tail.



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