The Keeper’s House

The RV Park has really quieted down since the weekend.  The tent campers are all gone, but about a half dozen, and the occupied  RVs are down to about a dozen or so.  A lot of folks rent RV spaces here for the season and use it as a weekend cabin through the summer.  This park is active through the weekends, but we are in a parking site removed from all of the noise.

I printed a list of things to do, that we might be interested in from a internet site that had over a hundred local attractions listed.  The list is eight pages long and has around 30 attractions listed.  Anne-Marie has double checked the list, and feels that most all would be interesting.  We are signed up here in the RV Park for a weeks stay, and we need to extend our time here to allow us to see more attractions.

This Lighthouse Keepers house was built in 1822, of stone quarried from nearby.  The house was built over two miles from the Marblehead Lighthouse, because it was better farming ground for the Keeper to grow crops on than the sparse soils on the lake shore close to the lighthouse.  The house has had several owners and additions in almost 200 years, and the historical preservation group has returned the house to what the Keepers family used during their life here.

The back of the stone house shows the roofline of one of the later additions.  The walls are nearly two feet thick, and the interior framing wood is all hand hewn, and all exposed wood show ax and tool marks used in shaping them.  Anne-Marie is looking at the kitchen fireplace.  There was no stove installed in the house, and the cooking was done in the same manner in this house as any pioneers house, over the fire in the fireplace.  This present fireplace was rebuilt from the original, our guide said that the house was in really poor shape, and the original mortar and stones were just falling apart.  There was even a warming oven on the right side of the fireplace, and it has a rounded arch on the top edge.  The cast iron cookware is all from the same time as the home was used by the Keeper.

Our guide and Anne-Marie in the front room of the house. A bedroom can be seen behind Anne-Marie, and the support for the mattress pads is rope strung through the frame, like a tennis racket.  The pantry area of the kitchen had a stone sink in the original house, and one from the same period was installed here.  The house has never had water or plumbing inside, one of the families that lived here for 40 years during the mid 1900s, had to carry water for inside use, and no bathroom inside.

Their small museum next door, had a few old tools displayed on the wall, and I was surprised that some of the old rusted tools that I had in the little garden shed at home were the same as the ones displayed.  The wooden tool with a long handle is a sausage press.  Life was hard in these times, and these early portraits don’t show pleasant smiles.