in the intersection. somebody ran a red light and bumped fenders. i'm standing there watching to see what happens. and from out of nowhere, deputy know what it was but it felt like somebody tapped me on the shoulder. i thought it was a co-worker. i turned around, wasn't nobody there. when i turned back around to look out the window, i turned around like in thissen at corner of my eye seen an nfl hanging between the ceiling and the wall. these boards here were laid out like a floor up there. all leveled off and everything. i pulled myself up through the little hole, i'm on my hands and knees. don't put my hand on a piece of metal. i'll move it out of the way and when i turned it over, it's missing soldiers office. third story, room nine was clara barton.

>> this saturday at noon eastern on c-span2's "book tv," join our live call-in program with distinguished former navy seal and author chris kyle as he talks about his life from professional rodeo rider to becoming the most lethal sniper in u.s. military history. on 10:00 p.m. on after words. >> if you think yourself as a family and yourself as a team, she said when i get a raise at work, it's like we got a raise, our family got a raise. i felt like she had a lot of

respect for what her husband was do willing. >> the changing role of women as the bread winners of the family. also this weekend, yerk the beautiful, director of pediatric neurosurgery at johns hopkins compares the decline of empires past before america and what should be done to avoid a similar fate. book tv every weekend on c-span2. in the fall of 2011, american history tv rifted old is it your bridge village, massachusetts, a living history museum that depicts early new england life from 1790 to the 1840. now on american artifacts we hear everywhere costumed historians who present what it was like to live and work in 19th century new england. curator thomas kel ker ker serves as our guide.

>> old is it your bridgeville is not a little town caught in a time wrap or anything it's kind of a sample plig of rural life in new england at the time when the society was really transforming from the old order to the modern world we live in today. we're showing you the indicate of the 1830s. so the american revolution was a couple generations ago. it's as far as away from them as world war ii is to us. the civil war is still a generation in the future. there's also rumblings with about slivry about they don't know what's going to happen any more than you or i do. 138 and push comes to shove, that's our default year. there's 26 states in the unit. michigan being the most recent. the population is the probably a million or so people. they do a census every ten years. but it's probably been that, it was 13.5 million back in 130. it's a time when the railroad is

coming in, our county see the is connected to boston by a steam railroad. they start making it regular transatlantic service. so it's not good night as old fashioned as some might think but the telegraph was tenanted in 1897. the industrial revolution is well under way. so a lot of the cloth that we're maybe smp still sown made by ladies at home but made in the textile mills. most people are still living on farms growing things like corn over here and living in fairly modest homes. the homes behind me is on the slauler end, one of the few we built her. about 600 square feet which represents about a quart or so of the housing stock of rural new england. so themaker was not only a

younger nation than a poorer nation. most of our buildings are antiques we've moved from the six new england states. we open the to the public in 1946 and. and trying to show people bits and pieces of life from the decade of the 180s. new england, as you may or may not be aware, was initially settled by sbish people after thenate viv people who came here for religious reasons. they wanted to purify christianity and have a pure form in their minds of worshipping god. when they at the timaled away from the coast, usually they settle on dispersed farm steads in $1700. but near the center of the town, they tend to build a meeting house. the place they have it is a meeting house. this particular one like most of our buildings was moved here.

this one was built in is it your bridge in 1832 by the time we're showing you start to have settlements growing up and a lot of new england towns end up developing a common. they usually leave a little bit of land in the center of town for training the militia, the predecessors of the national guard. that is sort of central commonly owned area becomes apark. some times it sill remains today when you go out not new england country side with craft shores and stores around it. the tin shop we put here in 1985, this building actually had a family history of being used

by a metal worker in the 19th century. we demonstrate the trade of tinning which was one of the things that central new england where we are was phone for in the 19th century. not every town had a tinner but a lot of towns did. >> the small holes are made with this punch and the longer holes are made with this one. and that -- because we've done this before. actually, we have a pattern. i scratched guidelines on here to go by. >> huh. >> person of my age in 138 would the have started out as apprentice. we would shine papers and when we will reached their 21st birthday, usually, we've become a juny man tinner and start getting bade. thank you for sopping back. >> the tinner's had long been

making things for distant markets for people they're not going to meet. they're making 16 lat terns in a day or little linings like spice greaters. or if he's making pint measures he might have to make 96 them in a day. he's relying on a network of door to door salesmanton fab out hundreds of miles from his shop selling these things to people 0 p who you don't know your neighborhood black smith is operating like a dry cleaner, in other words serving an neighborhood. people stopping by to have their horses shod, wagons repaired to have an old sax rebuilt so they can use it longer, that's the kind of thing that most black kiths are doing.

>> when it's orange, that's soft. when it's yellow, it's softer. all right, now i need to make it narrower again and a little bit longer. then ied into to make it match this one. >> black smiths are certainly a common trade you'll find in every new england community. most towns around here might have anywhere from a half a dozen to over a dozen black submits because every neighborhood needs one. a blacksmith is working the black metal iron, the most common material for the farmers tools around here, the trade man's tools. so offer needing the black smith to keep you working. to build your axes, increasingly by the 1800s, black smiths are

repairment. they're fixing plows and changes and schools and saxes. back in the 16 and 1700s, they're doing more of the making of those implements. by the 1800s you have people specializing in making things like axes and plows and other tools and then your neighborhood black smith is mort repairman that keeps new business by fixing those tools. >> the blue flames indicate that it's a cleaner fire than the yellow flames. the yellow flames along the end mean that i'm cooking off the impurities in the coal, called coke, which is the relining form of they'll boll like the reformed form of wood -- i make coke out of my coal so that i can get my metal hot enough to be soft enough to hammer on.

and i don't have to hit it hard when it's hot because it's softer. and it's basically just a matter of dropping my hammer onto the metal. >> mills are the last water powered mills to come along at the very end of the 1700s and they're the first to disappear. they started going out of business in the 1820s. when people are going to a store and buying factor made cloth, they don't need one step done for them. somebody they don't think about is doing all of it. >> having this step done for you is a realtime saber. this is about as old to them as television is to you and me. back in the 1730s, about 100 years before this, it was the

first efforts at mek needsing the carding. by the 1773, they're pretty much defected that design on the machine. some carding mills in the early 1800s were quite busy and ran almost year round but by the 1820s around here, the demand for the very limited number of water power sites bore manufacturing is forcing carding mills whose business is declining out of business. by 1850, they're pretty much gone from here. this one happened to south waterford mae because it was pretty much in the middle of know where. the people who owned it lived across the street. the machines are fairly so impact. so the with the maintenance, not toot much maintenance, you can keep them going. so the family that owned they have was running it commercially part time now and then into the 1950s. at that point, old is it your bridge facilities entered into

negotiations to secure the bill. we moved it here in 1936. when the founders were lookinging to build a new england vil, they realized they can move barnes and they knew that all these water communities had party powered, filling mills, and for that you not only need water but water that can be dammed up and dropped up. and the family that's in the museum lived just in the next town and knew there had been mills here in their boyhoods even those are long gone by the 1930s when they brought this property. the dam was still here and so they fought the property for this reason. in fact, when they bought the -- they called it after the town. the problem is people kept

looking for this museum they heard was being put and would show up in quinni. why don't they call it -- in 1946, we changed the name to old is it your bridge vil and open to the public and i've been here every since. >> this wheel is called a tub wheel. basically a big impeller. this blade's coming off the bottom of that wooden shaft. water drops about seven feet or so, picks up speed, hits the blade. it's like blowing on a pinwheel, spins the shaft around. putting a wooden tub around it keeps the water hitting the blades of the water wheel more. there's no bottom to the tub though so when the energy is expended it goes underneath and goes downstream.

this steering wheel probably using 50 gallons of water a second. our saw mills generate about 300 gallons a second. >> that's over a ton of water dropping over 100 feet. in the 19th century, people realized that these dams were stopping fish migration when the preliminaries showed up in plymouth, a wives and other fish were migrating up scream. but they knew that once they started damming up rivers, that the fish can't jump off the dams. they say we're not getting the shrimp that grandpa used to get. you were driving an automobile, you know you're polluting the planet and other tharng things on the air and the ground but

it's kind of like, we all make compromises. >> the first of the several davids white settled this lan in the 1770s. and dammed up the quinn nan bog river at first to run a saw mill. and then in the 1800, one of his successors i think the third or four david white had a grist bill built where you'res sits. so this was the white family farm in the 1700 and 1800s that the foundlers have re-created a 19th country system p sentiment. some of the items like the water noshd crystal came from here in is it your binge. the farmhouse up here the penny

precome farm. we call it that because a farmer named penny flee men lived it in from the 1820s to the 1840s. since we're showing the time right in the middle of that, put it back to his time. >> it's interesting this family, this house came from is it your bridge about a half and a half from here. plenty of freemen, the faempl who seasoned the house his wife was very ill suffering from a form of due beer chlo sis. at times he didn't have other people living in the house with wife. you have son or daughter living with him from time to time. the rest of his children where were all grown up and out of the house, all seven of them. from time to time, we know through historic records from the tavernscopier in town that he was taking some of his meals there will once in awhile. most of your -- if you're going

visiting but the time to go visiting is after all of the heavy work is done. dinner was that is you, what was the big meal of the day. right now we're cleaning up from having some of salt cod and potatoes and we baked our beatses in ashes. so we took beats. and lash and hot goals and put thealism ob top. lust let them sit there for a few hours. >> it's a nice way to make it nice and sweet. >> we have birds northwest pudding, apples that have been peeled and cored and a little bit of sugar and sin manpowered over that. something we would eat right along with part of our meal. apple buy is not only a besert. often it's eaten with brack fast or tee in the evening. >> spider on heather?

>> we have some frick see of parsnips. first boiled in pick. tried them in butter and scad the mill back in with a little bit of nutmeg. that's a wonderful sauce to have over your sclug lovely parsnips. >> >> it's probably better to eat them in the spring. one of the few vegetables we can actually leave out in the ground and they'll keep frozen over winter but won't be damaged when they thaw in the spring in fact, they'll start to grow again and convert all the starchiness into sugars and make it a very sweet vegetable. so not very many people these days get to experience that because mostly when you buy parse snips they're harvested right away during their growing season so they're pretty starchy. >> dried apples? >> these are made to you preserve them.

once these restfully dried, we'll store them away in the lovely chest of draws we have on the wall there. when i want to make an april pie, i can soak these in water overnight and they'll rehydrate. >> really. >> yeah. i could even city them down to you -- >> flies all over it. >> there are some applies. the flies really like animals and come in and like good food. who doesn't. >> and then this many other part there that's where the quill stay so them stay dry and more importantly, the points are protected. so hop up that part. and then i'm just going to close

it at the top so it's going to be one piece but still have to be hollow in both sections. just take off that extra calculate that i pushed over to close it. and i wanted it to be a little thicker at the top edge. i'm going to turn it inside out at the top. rule it right over. sl almost done. this is a hollow space here and there's another hollow space there so i've got to let the air out of that one if i can finish the shape. and then i'll punch some wholes in that other people so that that's where the quills can rest. what do you like to make your ink out of? do you use berries or the soot from your chimney? snir you don't use either of those? >> he we originally built the kiln in 1979 and back in the

nas, we were firing it three, four times a year. lately once or twice a year. every time you fire the killen, you destroy some of the killen. we make brick to keep rebuilding the killen. if it will cools down tool quickly, you get cracking on the family. once the killen is at 1,000 degrees it sort of staemsz the pots and moisture and whatever's left in them. then you can start stoking in earnest after about a day. >> on your mark, get set, go. for constructing our shoes, we are using wooden petition called shoe petition and this was a fairly new method in the early 1800s for shoe construction. these pegs go through the layers of the leather. there's a pair i just finished

and these are the pegs that hold the bottoms to the upper. one of the very important last steps of constructing a shoe is to take a special file designed to reach into the shoe. if any of those pegs are picking into the shoe, we will simply file them smooth. you would know at the if we got to do this because otherwise those things would be sticking into your foot that you would probably not like very much. >> this get a pair of leather lays. that will be a finished pair of shoes. in this shop, we're making an everyday leather work shoe. in the 130s at the work shoes were still made what we call straight. there was no left shoe or right shoe. they could go on either foot which is something that might it be unreasonable today. that's how. it makes my job easier. maybe in this shop.

this is something i'm just finishing up. all we would have been doing here would have been attaching the bottom of the shoes, the soles and the heels at this time, we would be getting the uppers already finish pdenned and they were sewn by ladies and girls in their haases, they were doing that paid by the peace. they're young man like myself are doing the best. so that was the system that had very manied there. actually a shout this size would have had up to eight, nine people in here. this would have been a very before the place. it 8d have been young men like myself, we'd all be working bottoming are shoes. one of our biggest industries in new england at this time was shoe making. we were taking around around 15 million pairs a year enough of in massachusetts alone. that was actually more shoes than there were people in the

entire country at the time. and so as you can imagine most of the shoes that are made around here were not being sold around here. a lot of them being sold to the western states, the caribbean. i as a shoemaker working here where are the shoes i make and frankly as long as i get paid, i don't really care. this was like a small factor is the best way to think about it. this wasn't the place where you would have you thought shoes but reproduced in standard sizes. >> some people ask how is it your bridge village came to be. albert b. wells, an executive with the american optical organization and some friends and family went up to go golfing that work. somebody suggested they go antiquing unsatisfied. mr. wells who i think was probably a little bit of a occur muddon said i don't want to

waste my weekend in a bunch of old junk shops. he fell in love with what he came to call his primitives, mouse traps and rolling balls and spinning wheels, the every day life that most people had rel lated to addicts and farns as great grandma's stuff that we don't care about. that first weekend, mr. wells bought 2000 wagons of -- he ended up having to move his family out of his baungs. he had two large against move to the property. and still haven't have at enough room and started to at that point release he wasn't going to live forever. they would all come to naught. ep did which a of people in his class did at the time, start

april the mooum, the kels cargo museum. he hired an architecting to display all the counties. with great pride and con fair, he unwiled there hot for to his family and friends. his only son george said, and these are my words, not mine. gad, miami's are dead institutions. only like you go to anthem. your vest if you want to get children today and yet to be interested in it, you need to put it in context in a living village with water power for running saw mills and grist mills and the shops where people will carry on these old trades that if we don't preserve them, we will die out. that's how old is it your bridge village came to be. they bought the farm we're standing on. within a week of that faithful statement and started moving in all buildings from all six new

england states by 1946, despite the great depression, a few hurricanes it, world war ii, a neelts pay theal that's right, by 1946, we open to the public as old is it your bridge village and have been welcoming people of since. >> for more information about old is it your bridge village wist osv.org. you're watching american history tv. all weekend, every weekend. on c-span3. weekends on c-span3, starting at 8:00 a.m. saturday, american mist tv. every weekend, we travel to historic sites, museums and ackivs to learn what they reveal be american history. sundays at 7:00 a.m. eastern and

7-10 here on c-span three. american history tp v also examines the presidents, their the policies and legacies through their hirveg speeches and discussions with leading historian. that's every sunday morning at 8:30 a.m. eastern and again at 7:30 and 107k 30 p.m. to find information about our other series including schedules and onlinen video archives at c-span.org dlash history. >> each week, american history tv visits museums and his toxic places to learn what artifacts can reveal about the history of the united states. next, a visit to the first lady's exhibit at the smithsonian's mooum of national history. >> lace sa graddy is the curator for women's political history. tell us where we're at in the american history museum. >> you are in the first