STURBRIDGE - At 400-square feet Old Sturbridge Village’s (OSV) Small House can’t compete with the stately buildings that line the museum’s common.
But its stature belies a significant connection to a local historical site and the story of those who worked towards a better life during the early years of our nation.
On Thursday, April 22 OSV Vice President of Museum Programs Ed Hood offered a look at the effort put towards recreating the Small House, the first historic structure to be built at the museum in 20 years when it was erected in 2007. The Sturbridge Historical Society sponsored the presentation.
The Small House accurately depicts a home common for low and middle class families in the late 1700s and early 1800s in New England.
The home that informed its construction belonged to Robert Croud (pronounced “crowd”), an African American who labored at Sturbridge’s graphite mine. Croud’s home was located off Leadmine Road and was just a cellar hole when Hood and others began an excavation of the site in the early 1990s to find clues about how the family lived.
During the presentation, Hood weaved together elements of local history, archeological practice, how Native and African Americans made their livelihood at the time and the way those elements combined more than 200 years later in an exhibit that preserves the past.

 

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