Thursday Doors – August 22, 2019

Thursday Doors is a weekly feature allowing door lovers to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos from around the world. Feel free to join in on the fun by creating your own Thursday Doors post each week and then sharing your link in the comments below, anytime between Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American eastern time). 

Upper Canada Village Part 1 – Morrisburg, Ontario

A little over 2 hours drive southwest of Montreal along highway 401 will take you to the heritage park and tourist attraction known as Upper Canada Village.

Built between 1958 and 1961 using both replicas and original heritage buildings moved from other sites in eastern Ontario, Upper Canada Village gives visitors a firsthand look at what daily life was like in a small village along the St. Lawrence river in English Upper Canada around the mid-1800’s.

For grade-schoolers in western Quebec and eastern Ontario, pretty much everywhere between Montreal and Ottawa, it’s quite likely that it was also your first school field trip and your first introduction to the study of history.

For adults, it’s just a pretty cool place to visit to get a peek into what rural life was like before Canada was an independent country.

Water diverted into one of the mills.

A quick side note for anyone who’s wondering why it was called “Upper Canada”:

After the British finally wrested control of the colonies of New France from the French in the 1760’s, the colony of Quebec was split in two and renamed as the “Provinces of Canada” by the constitution act of 1791. Naming of the two was based on their position relative to the river.

Bytown would become Ottawa and York would become Toronto. Newfoundland and the Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and St. John’s Island which became Prince Edward Island, were at the time separate colonies)

Anything up-river, west of the Ottawa River, became “Upper Canada”, and anything down-river, eastward out to the gulf of St. Lawrence, became “Lower Canada”. Later these would become the foundations of the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec respectively.

In today’s post we’ll look at the woolen mill and the flour mill.

#3 – Make a mistake? It’s gonna cost you…

Up in the woolen mill, machines pressed, stretched, twisted, and pulled the raw wool into thread that was later dyed and then woven into various materials for blankets and clothing.

The entire system was run on a series of shafts turned by belts and pulleys, all driven by the constant flow of water below the building.

Working conditions in the mill for the ladies were pretty strict when it came to modesty. Keep your hoops and crinolines at home you “comely young women”!

A door for dummies?

For obvious reasons I call this one the d’uh door 😉

Now let’s head on over to have a look at the flour mill.

Being even more essential to village life, the flour mill couldn’t afford to stop or slow down when the water level on the river dropped too low to drive the system. So a wood-burning steam system was incorporated as a back-up.

Wheat fed through a chute from the top floor fed down into horizontal stone wheels to be ground into increasingly fine flour.

Sacks of milled flour stacked and ready to be sold and used.

Stay tuned, next week when we’ll explore the rest of the village.

As always, thank you for looking 🙂

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