Some friends and I toured Swiss Village today. It's an outdoor museum featuring several buildings and fixtures from the earliest Swiss Mennonite settlers to come to the Berne, Indiana area, things dating from the mid 1800s. From the pump organs to chamber pots there were many things that I was familiar with. I'm not that old but I was the only one in the group who had ever used a chamber pot. (That's another story.) It was a bit of a shocker when we walked into the one-room school house (brick, with walls 3 bricks thick) and saw it furnished with the same kind of desks I sat in as a child.
We toured the grounds with a young docent who needed to refer to notes from time to time but was quite charming and obviously enjoyed her job.
One of the intriguing thoughts i came away with was this: in the mid-1800s it was said you could walk from one side of Indiana to the other and always touch a tree. Isn't that a fascinating description of wilderness?
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