Old Sturbridge Village: New England, Frozen in Eighteen Thirty
Near Worcester, Massachusetts
Old Sturbridge Village opened on June eighth, nineteen forty-six, built around a collection of Early American tools, furniture, glassware, and clocks that three brothers, Channing, Albert, and Cheney Wells, had been quietly assembling for decades. The Wells family were industrialists from Southbridge, and rather than display the objects in cases they decided to build a working village around them.
The result is a living museum of more than two hundred acres representing New England life from roughly seventeen ninety to eighteen forty, with fifty-nine antique buildings, three water-powered mills, and a working farm. Costumed interpreters demonstrate blacksmithing, printing, pottery, and farming as they would have been practiced during the Federal period. It is the largest living history museum in New England, visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year and widely credited with establishing the model for that kind of immersive historical experience.
