“Village Blacksmith" image wins first place!

This photo of our own village blacksmith, "Mr. Snitch" (Kevin Stirnweis) taken by yours truly during the regular October season at Pioneer Village, won first prize in the "People and Places" category of the 2011 Essex National Heritage Photo Contest. Starting next May you can come and see him in person! The link to the contest site is here:
http://www.essexheritage.org/photocontest/index.shtml

Halloween Craziness

October was a very busy month at Pioneer Village. The Village was not only the site of numerous tours this October, but several special events, including a Pirate Day, trick or treating Halloween weekend, and a "Haunted Village" attraction that ran the last two weekends of October. There were storytellers, witches, and a demon blacksmith. All told the Village had several hundred visitors. To all those who worked at the Village in all kinds of weather, Thank You. For those patrons who attended, Thank You as well.

Pioneer Village is now officially closed to the public, although private school group tours will continue until November 20th. The Village will re-open in may of 2012.

A Word about Puritan Crime and Punishment

The site of a lawbreaker sitting in the stocks or fastened in the pillory is a site familiar to anyone who is familiar with New England history. The stocks are one of the first things that you see when you enter Pioneer Village, and one of its most popular attractions. People are fascinated by this visible symbol of a stern, even brutal penal code. This fascination is appropriate, as the Puritans were very big on corporal punishment. As a small, isolated group living in the midst of wilderness and surrounded by enemies both real and imagined, the spectacle of public shame, humiliation and punishment, is a powerful social glue.
Puritan law was not only based on English Common Law, but on Old-Testament Biblical Law as well. You might be just as likely to find yourself in the stocks for violating the Sabbath as for stealing your neighbors' corn.
If you are interested in a detailed look at Puritan crime and punishment, I would recommend the book Wicked Puritans of Essex County by Tom Juergens. Juergens is a writer and journalist with roots in local daily and weekly newspapers such as the now defunct Beverly Times and  the Cape Cod Register. He has collected a series of stories, gathered from court records, that detail Puritan crime and punishments. The accounts are listed by type of crime. There are many surprises. There are the usual crimes of rape, arson, and murder, but also the crime of being a Quaker (a dissenting Christian sect) fornication, adultery, and disrespecting your parents. Punishments abound; whippings, brandings (on the hand and face), the wearing of symbolic letters designating your crime, nostril-splitting, heavy fines, banishment, and forfeiture of property. (Apparently spurious civil suits are not an exclusive invention of the twentieth century). The book shows that all people are subject to weakness, jealousy, greed and violence, regardless of what century they live in, or what moral code they subscribe to. 
It humanizes the Puritans, who are sometimes caricatured as cold, morally-superior people. It turns out they were all too human after all.

What's Cooking at the Village

Chris Tremblay

Hearth in the great hall of the Governor's House.

If you visit Pioneer Village, you may happen upon some samplings of Puritan cooking.

Chris Tremblay, our resident expert on all things pertaining to Puritan domestic life, will sometimes use the great hearth in the Governor's house to cook up treats for the other village interpreters. This recently has included squash as well as chicken soup, "journey-cakes" (a kind of cornmeal pancake) served with freshly-churned butter, fresh ground cinnamon, and nutmeg. There is also a signature "sweet chicken" dish. All of these are cooked on the fire in a cast-iron pot, much as they were over 300 years ago. There is nothing like having a hearty bowl of hot soup on a cold day, eaten from a wooden bowl, with a hand-made wrought-iron spoon to make you feel like a 17th-century Puritan.

Home-made chicken soup

Blacksmithing at Pioneer Village

Pioneer Village has a working blacksmith shop with a coal-fired forge. If you didn't know, a blacksmith is a person who makes and repairs things in iron by heating, hammering, and forging by hand. If you visit Pioneer Village on Sundays or Fridays you may be treated to a demonstration of the blacksmith's trade by "Mr. Snitch", one of two part-time resident blacksmiths. Mr. Snitch has been smithing for many years and enjoys regaling visitors with stories from the trade and perhaps a sea chantey or two. Stop by and say hello!

Pioneer Village: Movie Set?

If you have visited the Salem visitor center, watched PBS or the National Geographic Channel you may have caught glimpses of Pioneer Village, and not even realized it. Over the years Pioneer Village has been used for filming several productions about 17th-century life, Salem and the Salem Witch Trials.
Some recent productions shot at Pioneer Village have been:
We Shall Remain,  a five-part, 7.5 hour documentary series about the history of Native Americans spanning from the 1600s to the 1900s. The first segment of that series entiltled After the Mayflower which tells to story of  Wamanoag leader Massasoit. In that segment, Pioneer Village doubled for the Plymouth settlement.

Witch Trial Conspiracy a documentary hosted by Jon Briggs and published by National Geographic in 2011, which presents a new theory about the Salem Witch Trials implicating that the Reverend Paris played a much more active role in inciting the hysteria than was previously believed.

The latest film to be shot there is: The True 1692  a 3D film which tells the true story of the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692. Produced locally in a collaborative effort between CinemaSalem and History Alive! the film is, according to the Cinema Salem website;
"Historically-accurate, suspenseful, and emotionally-captivating, this new film immerses the audience in the dangerous realities of life in Salem Village at the end of the 17th Century and dramatically reveals the odd coincidence of forces, external and internal, which set in motion the tragedy of the witch trials". The film has its public premiere at Cinema Salem in October of 2011.