Heritage Day

Last year at this time we were busy packing, moving, and settling in to our house in Henderson. I didn't realize that Heritage Day had gone on until it was already past. Since it sounded like fun, I made a mental note to go this year. So, when Grandma Jost asked if I wanted to go with her, I said yes!

In case you don't know what Heritage Day is, here's a little background. Several years ago, Henderson started building a "Heritage Park" which consists of old buildings that were around in the late 1800s when immigrants settled in the area. At first, I thought it was kinda strange, but now I think it's pretty cool! They're slowly adding more buildings, including an immigrant house, a large barn, a schoolhouse, a summer kitchen, and an old farmhouse. Lane and I toured the buildings during Community Days, so we didn't see any of that this weekend.

Saturday morning, we picked up Grandma and headed over there right at 9. Following Lane's lead, we went here first:

There were several old tractors and cars lined up and Lane thought that was just the coolest thing he had ever seen! While he was sitting on them, a semi pulled up with three more tractors! Wow - tractors on a truck - how neat!





We finally pulled Lane away from the tractors and moved on to the barn. Snack time! There was so much good Mennonite food to choose from - zweiback, schnetya, apple preishke, new year's cookies, raisin-filled cookies, and more! I of course had to have a preishke and a new year's cookies. Lane tried schnetya for the first time and just loved it. Yum!

There were also demonstrations of old time activites such as rope-making, corn shelling, lard making, laundry day and freshly-pressed apple juice. Lane was most interested in the corn shelling and tried to help by putting the cobs back into the tub filled with corn. It was all pretty neat. I especially liked seeing the washing machine, since it had belonged to my grandma's family before she donated it to the museum.

Even though Lane wasn't really old enough to do the children's activites, he did earn some Smarties by putting bean bags into a wooden box!

A highlight for Lane was the horse-drawn wagon rides. He sat very still at first just watching the horses and looking around at everything. After awhile he got more comfortable and really enjoyed it!

We only stayed about 2 hours since Lane was getting pretty wound up and not really listening to me - he kept running up and down the sidewalk and falling down. It was a fun way to spend a Saturday morning and we'll go back next year!