The Shops
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"Historical shopping"
There's a certain uniqueness about shopping in basically the same stores as past presidents and founders of our country. In addition, the items here are charming in their historical likeness. It's fun to browse these stores, and some items are going to interest you enough to bring home. The store keepers will talk to you at length about what items are for and who would purchase them. You get the experience the colonists had when they went into a shop to buy things, and it's interesting that many, many things had very long lead times before they would actually have the item. Not like today where there is a lot of instant gratification on things you buy.
Kids will find the shopping interesting and fun and may even find a few things they like. Old fashioned games and writing sets are among the things my kids likes best. There are a variety of shops to go into, so browse or buy or both!
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"Fun with the Family"
A visit to the harness-and-saddle maker, apothecary, and shoemaker presents the everyday necessities of eighteenth-century life. Favorite stops of ours are:
The Greenhow Store. This store, we think, offers the most interesting assortment of allowance-affordable souvenir goodies reflecting the colonial era. Kids can buy items such as wax animals, scented soaps, chalk, ostrich plumes, initial seals, and clay wig curlers.
The Milliner. Along with providing hats for ladies, the milliner created clothes for women and children. On display are gowns, bonnets, bolts of cloth, and children’s dresses (also worn by boys until they were about 4 or 5 years old and graduated to britches).
Check the schedule so you can show up for the special program Welcome, Little Stranger; good fun for kids of all ages and informative as well. When James Slate, a tailor at the Milliner’s, discusses children’s clothing, kids in the shop make those “I can’t believe it” faces. Mothers (or servants) used “diapers,” or linen cloths, to fold “clouts,” what we think of as diapers, fastening them with straight pins. In reply to a visitor’s question about safety pins, Mr. Slate, after a long perplexed look, says, “Indeed, they are safe, Madam, if fastened correctly.” We also learn that toddlers put on “pudding caps,” a kind of padded, open helmet, to protect their noggins from bumps, and that even tots wore “stays,” those corset like contraptions.
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