Fruit! It’s good for you, delicious, and often beautiful - but have you ever thought of fruit as a status symbol? In today’s world of relatively quick, inexpensive long-distance transportation, we enjoy fresh fruit from all over the world year-round. We generally take this ability for granted. In the eighteenth century, however, if you or … Continue reading Fine and Fashionable Fruit Dishes
Foodways
Video: The Science of History – Experimental Archaeology & Stoneboiling
Archaeologists sometimes recreate technology from the past to understand how people lived. This is called experimental archaeology. Native American occupation of Ferry Farm left behind many artifacts including fire-cracked rocks. This video shows how those rock artifacts were made through a cooking technique known as stoneboiling. See the first video in our Science of History … Continue reading Video: The Science of History – Experimental Archaeology & Stoneboiling
A Curator’s Culinary Secrets
Here at Kenmore, we spent much of this week putting away all of the Christmas and Twelfth Night decorations that adorned the house throughout the holiday season. As we were carefully wrapping it all in tissue and putting it in boxes until next year, it occurred to me that our readers might be interested in … Continue reading A Curator’s Culinary Secrets
Historical Holiday Cheer
In the colonial-era, the Christmas season lasted into January and concluded on Twelfth Night, a festive evening to mark the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas and celebrated much like our New Year’s Eve is today. While the entire period featured frequent banquets and balls with much food and spirits, Twelfth Night was especially … Continue reading Historical Holiday Cheer
Ferry Farm is “Home Sweet Home” for the Holidays
Tradition says that Mary Ball Washington, mother of George Washington, was well-known for her excellent gingerbread. The story goes that she even served her gingerbread to the Marquis de Lafayette when he visited Fredericksburg as part of his postwar tour of America in 1784. Inspired by this tale and as Mary’s home for three decades … Continue reading Ferry Farm is “Home Sweet Home” for the Holidays
A Kenmore Christmas
Historic Kenmore is decorated for the holidays, portraying what it may have looked like during the Christmas season of 1775. At that time, the Lewis family would have just moved into Kenmore a couple of months earlier, and it would have been their first Christmas in the new house. It was a time of some … Continue reading A Kenmore Christmas
Lives & Legacies 