I attended my first Midsouth SCBWI conference last week. Nashville is almost 9 driving hours from my home, but fortunately, there are all sorts of fun things to do on the way there. We spread out the travel to two days so we were able to do three of them: Closer to Nashville, we popped into the National Corvette Museum; before that, a short tour (Frozen Niagra) in Mammoth Cave National Park; and a few hours into the first day, a two hour stroll through Conner Prairie.
Conner Prairie is an interactive history park that includes the 1836 Prairietown. A great place to do research for my work-in-progress set in 1850. I had questions answered on goats in Indiana, the size and type of subsistence farming and crops, where livestock lived, what barns looked like…
… what houses of that era looked like in Indiana, inside…
and out…
The Curtis’s house, Prairietown
… how people who needed help to live were taken care of…
Social services, Prairietown
what was available at the store, and much more. Priceless. Also a beautiful way to stretch your legs for a couple of hours!
We ended that second day at the “Live on the Green” free concert in Nashville, watching two great bands (The Dunwells and The Wallflowers). Great beginning to our destination.
That place is so cool. Did you see the uncovered food laying out on the table with the flies all over it at the inn? No refrigeration, or cleanliness at all. No wonder people died like… flies.
My favorite part of one of the talks was when you paid for the night at the inn, you paid for Your Place in the Bed,” not the bed. Who knows who/or what you’d be sharing a bed with. UGH.
It was a little tricky asking about some things, for instance, when they would start having a bathroom inside. Mrs. Curtis looked at me like I was crazy, then asked if I was talking about chamber pots. She got very suspicious when I asked if they ever had any runaway slaves come through. “Why?” she asked, looking at me sideways. “Are you a slave catcher?”
Judy– Did you see that Conner Prairie is having an interactive program about slave hunters this fall? Mary Ann
I did! Maybe….