Sturbridge: The Village That Time Rebuilt
Near Worcester, Massachusetts
Sturbridge, Massachusetts was settled around seventeen twenty-nine and incorporated in seventeen thirty-eight, named for Stourbridge in England. For two centuries it was a quiet agricultural and small-manufacturing town at the crossroads of central New England. Then in nineteen forty-six a local industrialist family, the Wellses, transformed it.
They had spent decades collecting Early American tools, furnishings, clocks, and household objects, and they decided to build a living museum around them. Old Sturbridge Village opened on the site, gathering fifty-nine antique buildings from across New England, including three working water-powered mills, into a reconstruction of a New England town of the seventeen nineties to eighteen thirties. Today it is the largest outdoor living history museum in New England, spread across more than two hundred acres.
Sturbridge itself has grown into a major destination where Interstate Eighty-Four and the Massachusetts Turnpike converge.
