A Trip Back In Time

On Wednesday, August 6, my daughter April, grandson Jack, husband Mike and I decided to take a trip to Upper Canada Village, an attraction near Morrisburg, Ontario which depicts the manner in which people lived in the late 1800's. I have been to UCV several times in my life, once with my parents which I don't remember, and another with my class in elementary school nearly fifty years ago. Almost every school in Ontario has taken class trips there and continues to do so to this day.

The draw at UCV is the various buildings and methods which early settlers used to conduct their everyday chores and business and lived their lives. There is a church and school, mansions and working man quarters, bakery, cheese making factory, tin smith, and blacksmith, lumber mill, flour mill, restaurants, broom makers, dressmakers and a complete farm with horses, pigs, cattle etc. as there would have been in the villages at that time. You can go for train rides, horse-drawn wagon rides, milk cows, view different trades in action. All which was part of everyday life in the eighteen hundreds.

As a child, fifty years ago, I could scarcely imagine all the manual labour it took to produce a loaf of bread, get lumber, shoe horses and live in that labour intensive, yet simple society. I can only imagine that to my grandson Jack, it must all seem incredible. I know on this visit I certainly could appreciate it much more than I did back when I visited as a child. One wonders how those people endured such hardship and toil, but that was what life was, hard work, good home grown food and a deep sense of community.

I couldn't help but reflect on the irony of it all. The gardens they grew and ate from, the unbleached flour, the homemade bread, is today what we call 'organic' and the way of life 'sustainable' by using the power of nature to run machines. ' Living off the land ' is today, to be envied. It has taken us nearly 200 years to discover that they had it right all along. I ask myself, would I go back in that time, if I could? What kind of person would I have been if I had lived in that era?

If you get nothing out of a trip to this village which time has forgotten, you surely get an appreciation for what you have now and a bit of nostalgia for the simpleness of what life used to be.