Yorktown Victory Center

I got packed up in record time at the end of the OVPR PMS so I headed over to the Yorktown Victory Center for a busman’s holiday.  The Center has a nice museum, a colonial farm and a military encampment area.  During the summer they have a lot of local students doing Living History at the site.  But by late September there are just a few staff here and there at the farm and encampment. 

Obviously it was laundry day at the farm.  I’ve done laundry colonial style, it’s a whole lot of hot, hard and wet work. 

The majority of the farm crops had already been harvested.  Most of what was left were various squashes and a few beans.  Only heritage seeds are used on this farm.

These bowls hold a representative sampling of the foods harvested from the farm gardens.  The garden crops are all food crops.  There were also tobacco and large scale corn fields.

The storehouse also had these dried cooking and medicinal herbs hanging from the rafters.  They were grown in another garden patch all of their own that was quite close to the kitchen area.

The farm is middling in size and prosperity.  This is the primary common room of the house.  The cooking was generally done either in an outdoor kitchen area or a separate kitchen building.  Kitchens burned down frequently so it wasn’t a good idea to have it as part of the rest of your house building.

The farmer and his wife have a ground floor bedroom with a nice bedstead.  The bed was most likely made by the farmer or gotten from a neighbor skilled in basic woodworking and paid for through barter. 

Family members who were old enough to climb a ladder safely would have slept in the loft on pallets laid right on the loft floor. 

The military encampment is on the far side of the museum.  Photography isn’t allowed in the museum, so there are no pictures to post.  It is quite nicely done.

The Rev War cannons used as mobile units in the field were quite small particularly when compared to the Civil War cannons which commonly grace courthouse lawns these days. 

General Washington had a lovely marquee to run the war from but line officers quarters were more often wall or even wedge tents.  This is the quartermasters tent.  The area in front of the tent is shaded by a fly, in part because various stores are kept there.

This bed is in a Captain’s tent.  The ticking is filled with straw or cornhusks depending on what’s available.

This tent houses 2 line officers.  The folding cots were not always available so the officer on the right has procured other means to keep himself off the cold and often muddy ground.

 

 I’m tempted to duplicate the “bed” supports for my own light camp at events.

This tent just inside the museum foyer (were photography was allowed) would have been assigned to 6 foot soldiers.  Two of them would have been on duty at any one time so the tent only had to sleep 4 men at a time.  Common soldiers often received a bed sack for straw or corn shucks but had to find their own way to elevate the bed sack off the ground.  (There were common soldier tents set up outside but there were several school groups in that area of the Center eating lunch.)

Clearly this regiment has a well appointed surgeon.

He has all the common medicinal herbs and several drugs from overseas also.

Common soldiers daily stew cooking over the fire.  This is one of 8 such cooking areas arranged in a circle.  The dirt from the trench and cooking holes is put on top of the ground in the center.  This British system of organizing regimental cook fires concentrates the fire’s heat under the pot so less wood is used.  Small fires are safer than large fire too.  The food cooked in this pot would serve 12 men, ie 2 tent’s worth. 

(I think I need to back here in mid-summer.)