TOURISM PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND
Dig your hands into history A visit to Orwell Corner Historic Village
Daily life in the 1890s
BY DARCY RHYNO
I
like a museum where I can get my hands dirty. I want to feel in my muscles and bones what it was like to live daily life back when almost everything was handmade. I want to work a piece of wood, ride a horse, dip a beeswax candle, churn butter and cook over the hearth. That’s why Orwell Corner Historic Village in rural PEI is one of my all time favourites. Right now, I’m getting my hands dirty in the blacksmith shop, hammering at a red hot length of metal, shaping it on the anvil into a square nail. The coal fire in the forge is blazing hot inside the otherwise dimly
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hold my stick of metal in the fire, pull it out and place it on the anvil. As I work it with the hammer, it fades from white, to yellow, orange and red, and finally to grey. In the end, it’s questionable whether or not a carpenter could pound the crooked thing into a board without bending it, but I’m happy to head off to the next Orwell Village experience with my prize and a pair of dirty hands.
PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND
lit shop. Nails like the one I’m making are probably holding this shop together—and most of the buildings in the village. I learn from the blacksmith that shoes for the horses are made here, as are hinges for the doors, hooks for coats, machine parts, tools and kitchen utensils. I have a new appreciation for craftsmen so skilled, they sometimes doubled as the village dentist. The Orwell blacksmith shows me how to add coal to the forge and work the bellows, puffing the smoking heap into a blazing inferno that lights up the shop as if the sun just shone through an open window. I
Orwell Corner Historic Village re-creates daily village life on the island in the late Victorian period, the 1890s. The village was founded by 19th century settlers from the British Isles. Captain John MacDonald arrived with some. Others emigrated from the Isle of Skye in Scotland and County Monaghan in Ireland. Still others were United Empire Loyalists from the American Eastern Seaboard. Even today, many residents of the Orwell area are descendents of these earliest settler families. Orwell Corner is about 30 kilometres from Charlottetown, and thrived as an eastern island agricultural crossroads. There’s a school in the village—I had a short
