The Upper Canada Village is Canada's answer to Jamestown. Well, sort of. Unlike Jamestown, UCV never really existed. However when the St. Lawrence Seaway was created, a lot of nice old historical buildings were fated to be drowned forever by all those wiers and dams. So they moved many of them, and created a village similar to what would be found along the St. Lawrence in 1867. There is a blacksmith shop, a broom maker's shop, a school house, a cobblers, a flour mill, and a whole lot more.
Normally it is closed through the winter, though of course there is a caretaker staff who string quite modern strings of lights all around the buildings, and during the 12 days of Christmas, they hold a festival of lights. The gentle horses pull the sleighs and carriages thorugh the streets, and there are choirs in the church, bread baking in the bakery, and cheese being made and sold in the general store.
There is no attempt to really re-create anything....it is too cold, and during the evenings, electric lights and heaters make the experience bearable..and Upper Canada Village becomes a sort of theme park. But thats okay. After all, everybody likes a sleigh ride!
And we didn't have any snow....so a lot of the magic was missing. Wagons replaced the sleighs, and their hooves made a sort of "klink klink" sound on the frozen ground. But the chocolate was hot, the horses pretty, everybody refused to sing carols (a blessing), and it was a better use of an evening than watching "Its a Wonderful Life" again.
2 comments:
Beautiful! I love the atmosphere of a sleigh ride through old villages like this. I'm glad the buildings were saved, after all.
Oh I love the houses all lit up like that!
We have Barkerville here,a ghost town/museam and they do something similar.
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