Upper Canada Village

 Last week we visited Upper Canada Village which is suppose to show an Ontario village around 1860.  This is the hardware section of a general store.  The barrels probably had nails and spikes and other bits needed for building.

This is a view of the outside of the store.  It's quite plain as most of them would have been.

 Inside are an assortment of useful kitchen and dining items as well as a wonderful rocking horse that would be hard to resist buying. On the other side of the store, bags of flour, sugar, candy and other necessities were on display, but too many tourists were blocking the view to get a good photo.

The grocery store would often be the post office as well.

These posters are actually printed at the print shop at the village using old wooden and metal type.  The print shop also produces posters to advertise current events going on at the village.  When we stopped in, the woman printer was hard at work creating a new poster for a special fall festival.  She explained some of the challenges of picking an appropriate font as some of the fonts might not have enough of one letter to write the needed words, or some fonts just make a particular word look odd. All the tiny print on the Lion Of The North poster was set by hand at the print shop. Great looking horse!

Southern Ontario became home to many United Empire Loyalists (people loyal to the British monarch) as they fled the US around the time of the American Revolution.  This house definitely has a New England feel to it.

 The side garden had lots of zinnias which were probably popular back then.

In the backyard, we saw a couple of nice pear trees.  Some varieties of pears are hardy enough for our winters, but apples trees are by far the more popular fruit tree.

Behind the house is a large mixed vegetable and flower garden.  The flowers here would be used for bouquets or as dried flowers.
More pictures next time.  I was disappointed to realize I didn't take photos of the many "villagers" dressed in period costume. Some other time I must focus on the people.