don't usually witness one, but i witnessed an accident out here in the intersection. somebody ran a red light and i'm standing here watching to see what happens. and from out of nowhere, i don't know what it was, but it felt like somebody tapped me on the shoulder. i thought it was a cowork per. so i turned around and there wasn't nobody there. so when i looked out the window, i turned around like this, and the corner of my eye seen an envelope hanging between the ceiling and the wall. these boards were laid out like a floor up there. all levelled up and everything. i pulled myself up to the hole. and on my hands and knees, i put my hand on a piece of metal. so i picked it up to move it out of the way so i could get to where the enve low was. so when i turned it over, it said missing soldiers office.

this saturday at noon eastern, join our live call in program with former navy seal chris kyle as he talks about his life to becoming the most lethal sniper in u.s. military history. at 10:00 p.m. on afterwards -- >> if you think of yourself as a family and as a team, and she said when i get a raise at work, he's so proud of me. it's like we got a raise.

our family got a raise. i felt she redefined providing to include what her husband does and she ha h a lot of respect. >> the richer sex author on the changing role of women as the breadwinners of the family and how that impacts their lives. also this weekend, "american the beautiful" director of neurosurgery ben carson compares empires past with america and what should be doen to avoid a similar fate. book tv every weekend on c-span 2. > in the fall of 2011 american history tv visited old sturbridge village, massachusetts, a living history museum that depicts life from 1790 to 1840. now on american artifacts we hear from costumed historians who present what it was like to live and work in 19th century new england. curator thomas kelleher serves as our guide.

>> this is not some little town caught in a time warp. it is a recreation, kind of a sampling of rural life in new england at the time when society was really transforming from the old order to the modern world we live in today. we're showing you the decade of the 1830s. american revolution was a couple generations ago, as far away as world war ii is to us. there are also rumblings about slavery but they don't know what's going to happen in 20 or 30 years any more than you or i do. that's the time period to keep in mind. in 1838, push comes to shove, that's our default year. 26 states in the union, michigan being the most recent. population of the united states is probably around 17 million or so people. they do a census every ten years so we don't quite know yet but it is probably about that. it was 13.5 million back in 1830.

it's a time when the railroad is coming in. our county seat of worcester. they started making trans atlantic steamship service from atlanta to boston by 1938. it is not quite as old-fashioned as some people might think, but the telegraph was patented in 1837. just to give you a couple of things to hang your hat on. the industrial revolution is well under way. a lot of the cloth we're wearing is still factory made. but made in the textile mills of new england. there's over 700 of those. but most people are still living on farms, following agriculture and the land, growing things like corn over here and living in fairly modest homes. the home behind me is on the smaller end. it's one of the few we actually built here. that's about 600 square feet, which represents about a quarter or so of the housing stock of rural new england.

america was not only a younger nation but a poorer nation than it is now. most of our buildings though are antiques that we've moved here from the six new england states. we've opened to the public in 1946, been open ever since as a private not-for-profit educational corporation. we're trying to show people bits and pieces of everyday life from the decade of the 1830s. >> new england was initially settled by english people after the native people who came here for religious reasons. they wanted to purify christianity and have a purer form in their minds of worshiping god. and when they settled in these upland towns away from the coast usually they settle on dispersed farmsteads in the

1700s. near the geographic center of the towns they tend to build a meeting house. worship services are called meetings so 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 sturbridge. by the time you show it, it's built up and a new of new england town, most, in fact, end up developing a common. usually when they lay out the towns they leave a little bit of land in the center of town for town business, for training the militia, unpaid, uninformed predecessors of the national guard. that sort of central commonly owned area sort of becomes a park eventually in a lot of towns. some towns it just gets gobbled up. in a lot of towns it remains today when you go out to the new england countryside. with houses and craft shops and stores around it. the tin shop we put here in 1985. this building actually had a

family history of being used by a metalworker in the 19th century. we demonstrate the trade of tinning, which was one of the things that central new england, where we are, was known 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. because we've done this before, we have nowhere to put them. actually, i have a pattern. i scratched guidelines on here to go by. a person of my age in 1838 would have started as an apprentice. we would sign apprentice ship papers and one would reach their 21st birthday usually would become a journeyman tinner and start getting paid. thank you for stopping by.

>> the tinners had long been making things for a distant markets, for people they're not going to meet. they are making 16 lanterns in a day and little things like spice graders. if he's making pint measures he might have to make 96 of them a day. he is relying on the peddlers to sell these things to people he doesn't know. your neighborhood black smith is by and large operating like a dry cleaners in the 21st century. in other words, serving a neighborhood. people living within a couple of miles at most of the shop are stopping by to have their horses shod and wagons repair and to have an ax rebuilt to use it longer. that's the kind of thing that most blacksmiths are doing.

>> when it's orange, it's soft. when it's yellow, it's softer. now we need to make it narrower and a bit longer. they need to make it match this one. >> blacksmiths are certainly a common trade you will find in every new england community. most towns around here might have anywhere from a half dozen to over a dozen blacksmiths because every neighborhood needs one. what a blacksmith is doing is working the iron. the most common element in the earth, but the most common material for the farmers tools and the tradesman's tools. your need in the neighborhood for a black smith to keep you working to rebuild your axes and

increasingly by the 1800s, the time we show here, black smiths repairmen. they are fixing the axes in the 1600s and 1700s. by the 1800s, people are specializing with the industrial revolution. specializing in making things like axes and plows and other tools. and then your neighborhood blacksmith is more the repairman that keeps you in business by fixing those tools. >> the orange flames indicate that it's a cleaner fire than the yellow flames. the refined form of that pit coal like the refined form of wood is charcoal. i make coke out of my goal. 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. it's basically just a matter of dropping my hammer on to the metal. >> the mills are the last mills to come along at the end of the 1700s. they're the first to disappear. in this area the cattle mills started going out of business in 1820s. when people were buying factory made cloth, they don't need one step done for them. they don't even think about it. if you're raising sheep, making your own cloth, this one very tedious step done for you is a time saver. this is about as old to them as television is to you and me. back in the 1730s, about 100

years before this, the first efforts, by the 1770s, 1773, they perfected that design machine. some carting mill, specially in the late 1700s, early 1800s, were quite busy and ran almost year-round. by the 1820s around here, the demand for the very limited number of water power sites for manufacturing is forcing carting mills whose business is declining out of business. by 1850 they are pretty much gone from here. this one happened to survive in south waterford, maine, because it was in the middle of nowhere. the people lived across the street so it wasn't vandalized. the machines were fairly low impact. with maintenance, not too much maintenance, you can keep them going. the family that owned this mill was running it commercially, part time, now and then, into the 1950s. at that point, most villages and other museums, entered into

negotiations to procure the mill. we moved it here in 1963. when the founders of the museum were looking for a place to build their recreated new england village, they realized they could move barnes and black smith shops and houses down to any piece of land. they learned all the communities had water-powered saw mills and brisk mills and fulling mills. for that you not only need water, but water that can be dammed and dropped to generate energy. the family that found a museum lived in the next town. they knew that there had been mills here in their boyhoods even though they are long gone in the 1930s when they bought the property for this reason. they called it after the river instead of the town.

probably was, people kept showing up looking for this museum they heard was being built and they were looking for this. they kept showing up in a place in connecticut and go where is this museum they are building? it's in massachusetts. why don't they call it so? in 1946 we opened it to be named old sturbridge village. we changed the name around opened it up to the public and have been here ever since. >> this is called the tug wheel. basically blades coming off the bottom of that shaft. water drops about seven feet and picks up the speed. it hits the blade, just like blowing out a pinwheel. spinning a wooden tub around it keeps the water from the water wheel warm. there's no bottom to the tub

though. so it goes downstream. this wheel is probably using 50 gallons of water a second. in fact, the sawmill uses over 300 gallons a second. that's over a ton of water. in the 19th century, people realized that the dams was stopping fish migration when the pilgrims showed up in plymouth, other fish were migrating upstream and the salmon was getting up into vermont from the long island sound. they knew once they started damming up rivers that the fish can't jump up the dams and they said, well, we are not getting the fish grandpa used to get. but they're saying we need the power. it's like you were driving an automobile. you know you are polluting the planet and putting terrible things in the air and on the

ground and using plastics, but it's like, well, we all make compromises. >> the first of the several david white settled this land in the 1770s. they dammed up the river at first to run the saw mill. then, in the 1800s, one of his successors, the third or fourth david white had a mill built where ours sits. this was the white family farm in the 1700s or 1800s. the founders of the museum had turned into and recreated 19th century settlement. some of the building, like the carting mill, have come from hundreds of miles from south waterford, maine. some of them came here like the meeting house or the farmhouse up here. the freeman farm.

we call it the plenty freeman house because the farmer plenty freeman lived in it from the 1820s into the 1840s. we're showing the time right in the middle of that. they put it back to his time. >> it's interesting. this family and house came from sturbridge about a mile and a half from here. plenty freeman, the farmer who owned the house, his wife was very ill suffering from a form of tuberculosis. at times he didn't have other people living in the house with he and his wife. he had just two adult son and daughter living with him from time to time. the rest of his children were all grown up and moved out of the house, all seven of them. from time to time, we know through records from the town, he would take his meals there once in a while.

for the most part, he had most of the meals at home. if you are going visiting, the time is after the work was done. dinner was at noon. dinner was the big meal of the day and we were cleaning up. layered so ash and coal and beets on top. more hot coal and ash around them. let them sit for three hours. it's a great way to make them nice and sweet. we have bird's nest pudding which is apples that have been peeled and cored and a custard of milk, eggs, and sugar and cinnamon poured over that. something dish, but we would eat right along with the meal. part of our meal that includes the apple pie that is next to it. apple pie is not generally a dessert. our meal is breakfast or dinner at noon or tea in the evening.

>> what's in the spider on the hearth? >> we have some parsnips. they were first boiled in milk. fry them in butter. then we add the milk back in with a little bit of mace and nutmeg. that's a wonderful sauce to have over your lovely parsnips. it's probably to eat them in the spring. they are one of the few vegetables we can leave in the ground and they will keep frozen over the winter, but they won't be damaged over the spring and they will start to grow again and they convert all that starchiness into sugars and make it a very sweet vegetable. not very many people these days get to experience that because mostly when you buy parsnips, they are harvested right away during their growing season, so they're pretty starchy. >> what do you do with the fried apples?

>> this is a way to preserve them. we will store them away in paper sacks. and when i want to make an apple pie, which is usually about spring and summer, i can then soak is spring and summer, i can soak these in water overnight and they'll rehydrate. i can stew them down to sauce if i wanted to. >> there are flies all over it. >> there are some flies. when we live on a farm like this, there are a lot of animals. the flies really like animals. so they come in. they like warmth and good food. who doesn't? >> then this other part there, that's where the quill stays. so they stay dry, and even more importantly, the points are protected. pop up that part.

then i'm going to close it at the top. it's going to be one piece, but it's going to be hollow in both sections. just take off that extra clay i pushed over to close it. i wanted to be a little thicker at the top edge. so i'll turn it inside out at the top, roll it right over. almost done. there is some -- this is a hollow space here, and there is another hollow space there. so i got to let the air out of that one so i can finish the shape. and then i'll punch some holes in that other part so that's where the quills can rest. what do you like to make your ink out of? do you use berries or soot from your chimney? >> i don't use either of those. >> you don't use either of those? >> no.

>> we originally built the kiln in 1979. back in the '80s we were firing it three, four times a year. lately we've been doing it about once or twice a year. jugs and pots and pans and such, every time you fire the kiln, you destroy some of the kiln. we also make bricks so we can keep rebuilding the kiln. if it heats up too quickly or cools down too quickly, you'll get cracking on the pieces. once the kiln is about a thousand degrees, it sort of sometimes, the kilns and the pots give up whatever moisture is 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 pegs. they are called shoe pegs. this was a fairly new method in the early 1800s for shoe construction. these pegs go through the layers

of the leather. there was a pair that i just finished and these are the pegs that hold together the bottoms to the uppers, the tops of the shoes. one of the important last steps of constructing the shoe for us is to take a special tool called a float, a kind of special file. that is designed to reach into the shoe and if any of those pegs are sticking into the shoe, we will simply file them smooth and it's a very important last step. you would know it because otherwise the pegs would be sticking into your foot which you would not like very much. so we file the pegs smooth. this will get a pair of leather laces and that is a finished pair of shoes. so in this shop, you're make an everyday leather work shoe. nothing too fancy. in the 1830s, the work shoes were made what we call straight. what that meant there was no left shoe or right shoe. they actually could go on either foot, which is something that might seem unusual today. but that's how shoes were made for hundreds of years. and it makes my job a little

easier. so that's the kind of shoes that are made in this shop. this is some i'm just finishing up. in the 1830s in a shop like this, all we would have been doing is just attaching the bottoms of the shoe, the soles and the heels. at this time, we would be getting the uppers already finished. the uppers were sewn by ladies and girls in their houses. they were doing that, paid by the piece to sioux the uppers. young men like myself were doing the rest, doing the bottoming. that was the system that developed here. actually a shop this size probably would have had up to maybe eight or nine people working here. it would have been a very busy place. believe it or not, this was a large shoe shop. most were much, much smaller. it would have been young men like myself. we'd all have a shoemaker's bench, a set of tools, and we'd all be working bottoming shoes. it was very big business. one of the biggest industries in england at time was shoe making. 15 million pairs a year just in massachusetts alone, just in this one state.

that was actually more shoes than there were people in the country at the time. so as you can imagine, most of the shoes that were being made around here were not being sold around here. a lot were going down to the southern states, the western states, the territories, and even the caribbean. as a shoemaker, i would have no idea who was going to make the shoes i make. frankly, as long as i get paid, i really don't care. this shop was really like a small factory is the best way to think about it. this wasn't a place where you buy shoes, but where they are mass produced in standard sizes. >> how much do you get paid an hour? >> some people asked how sturbridge village came to be. it really got its start in 1926 when a man named albert b. wells who was an executive with the american optical corporation and friends and family went up to vermont to go golfing for the weekend. problem was it poured rain, they couldn't go golfing. someone suggested that go antiquing, instead.

mr. wells who is a bit of a curmudgeon said i don't want to waste my weekend in junk shops. they prevailed on him to go anyway. he had an epiphany. they went anyway. he fell in love with what he came to call his primitives, things like mouse traps and wooden bowls and rolling pins and spinning wheels, the kind of debt detritus of early american everyday life that most people just had relegated to attics and barns and great grandpa's stuff that nobody cared about. but that very first weekend mr. wells bought two wagon loads of antiques and it came an all-consuming mania for them after that. he ended up moving his family out of his mansion because there wasn't room for them and the antiques. he had two large barns that he filled them literally to the rafters with the antiques and still didn't have enough room and started at that point to realize he wasn't going to live forever. and then when he died, his children would probably sell dad's junk and it would all come to naught. so what he did, which is what a lot of people of his class did

at that time was incorporated as a not for profit organization and started a museum, the wells historical museum. he hired an architect to design a series of galleries to display the antiques and with pride and fanfare, he unveiled the plan that he was quite hot for as he said to his family and friends. they were underwhelmed. his only son george wells said, and these are his words, not mine, dad, museums are dead institutions. only old people like you go to them. your collection is important, but if you want to get children today and the children yet to come to be interested in it, you need to have a village, you need to put it in context in a living village with water power or for running sawmills and grist mills, and the shops where people will carry on these old trades that if we don't preserve them will die out. and that's how old sturbridge village came to be. they bought the farm we are standing on within a week of that fateful statement and started moving.

in old buildings from all six new england states. by 1946, despite the great depression, a few hurricanes, world war ii, a near fatal heart attack that mr. wells suffered, by 1946, we opened to the public as old sturbridge village, and have been welcoming people ever since. >> for more information about old sturbridge village, visit their website at osv.org. you are watching american history tv. all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. weekends on c-span 3 starting at 8:00 a.m. saturday. it's american history tv. every weekend, american history tv travels to historic sites, museums, and archives to learn what artifacts reveal about american history. watch american artifacts sundays

at 8:00 a.m. eastern and again at 7:00 and 10:00 here on c-span 3. american history tv also examines the presidents, their policies and legacies through their historic speeches, and discussions with leading historians. that's every sunday morning at 8:30 a.m. eastern, and again at 7:30 and 10:30 p.m. find out more information about our programs and our other series, including schedules and online video archives at c-span.org/history. >> american history tv visits museums and historic 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 national museum of american history. lisa kathleen graddy is the