Field Trip to the 1719 Hans Herr House

.    I absolutely love history.  By the time we got to the 1700s in our history class last year, many of the places I had wanted to visit for a field trip were closed, so, last week, we headed over to the fabulous 1719 Hans Herr House.  It was built in 1719 by Christian Herr, and because it was used as a barn for many of its more recent years, it was kept much the same as it was back in the 1700s.   The museum has done an excellent job of keeping period-correct items inside the house, even using an original inventory of things that were in the house, and our tour guide was very knowledgeable and friendly. 

     We visited the Native American longhouse which was also filled with period-correct items.  We sat on the benches and listened to our guide tell us about the indigenous peoples who lived in this area the same time that many Anabaptist settlers arrived in the New World.  

     After our tour was over, we shopped in the museum gift shop and then realized we had an extra thirty minutes, so we drove a half mile down the road to where Hans and his family were buried.  While we didn't find his grave (it is so old it isn't marked), we did find several graves of his descendants, and we did some math figuring out how old they would have been.  That was definitely the weirdest part of any field trip I have ever led, but it was educational, and the students really enjoyed it.