Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation (12/2/2023)

Saturday, December 2, 2023

A pleasant day for a Colonial Christmas at the Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation in the Newtown Square, PA section of Ridley Creek State Park. The venue is a living history museum dedicated to presenting farm life in 1760-1790.

View across the pasture to the barn (1978 reconstruction
of an 18C barn replacing a 19C one)

Behind the kitchen garden is a stone cabin (late 1600s),
which may have been the first residence on the property

The stone farmhouse (center section c 1690,
later additions in 1740 and 1810 perhaps) (KSS)

Visitors could make a pomander, poking
cloves in patterns into an orange to hang
in a home to provide a spicey scent

Spinning wool was demonstrated

A knitter listens to live colonial music

Hmm, wine and liqueurs?

The hearth kitchen

A young reenactor describes his favorite treat

The list of what was baked today

The farmstead well

The blacksmith enlisted help to work the bellows

Candles, probably made of paraffin

Visitors could dip their own candles,
but the pot was shallow, and somehow
collected detritus being left out all week ...

... so the candles turned out lumpy

A view inside the stone cabin

This young woman had a wool carder, but at the
moment she was needle felting/getting the wool
fibers to bind together

Rust, the ox, celebrated his ninth birthday today

The turkey should be celebrating that
he missed being a Thanksgiving meal

A view of the kitchen garden,
with perhaps a trellis for growing hops

The 18C style outhouse (1991!)

Ridley Creek runs along one side of the farmstead

There are a few different breeds of sheep

This might be a Leicester Longwool sheep;
there was also a Soay from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland

In the Media section of Ridley Creek State Park,
a trail was blocked by downed trees, so we did not try
to find the Roundtop farmstead of the Minshall family