MORE NAUVOO

There were so many places to go to and see in Nauvoo, it’s taking me forever to cover it all.  So, here’s another bit of restoration.

We visited the post office

And the printing office where John Taylor produced the Church publications

Visited the Bakery

They found the bakery foundation when they were excavating known sites and rebuilt the bakery to the dimensions of the old foundation but had to guess at what the building actually looked like

Inside the bakery.  Here they gave us a gingerbread cookie to eat.  It was not baked here, this is just for show.

Showing the ovens they baked their bread in

We visited the Lyon Drug and store

Fun building to look around in

These bottles with colored water let passers by know if the town was enjoying good health.  If there was a lot of sickness in town, the water was changed to different colors to indicate different sicknesses.

Shelves in the store.  This section was for the Drug Store

This section was for food and dry goods

We visited the shoemaker

Inside was the forms they made the shoes from.  You would have gone into the shoemaker and found a form that matched your foot and picked out the material you wanted it made from and he would have made you a pair of shoes.

Shoes were made with no distinction between the left or right foot.  If your right shoe started to wear a little, you could put it on the other foot so the shoe would wear more evenly and last longer.  Many people switched their shoes every day to get the most wear out of them.

We visited the brick yard

Apparently there was an abundance of clay in the Nauvoo area and they could mix the clay with river sand and make some very good bricks.  After the bricks were fired in the kiln, they turned red with those closer to the flame a darker, almost black color which were called clinkers.  Those further away from the fire of the kiln were a lighter color.

These are some of the tools used in brickmaking.

At one time, there were six operating brick yards in Nauvoo, all going as fast as they could to meet the demand for bricks.  When the Saints first moved into the Nauvoo area, there were lots of trees and they all thought they would have plenty of building materials for their homes.  They soon discovered that the native trees were hollow and could not be used for building so they had to float logs down the river from Wisconsin to build their homes.  Bricks became a much needed building material.

This Prairie Grass Demonstration was quite interesting.  In old Nauvoo, they sold the land in one acre lots.  This demonstration is one square acre that they have just let grow naturally in the native prairie grass.  They did this to give people an idea of how big an acre of ground is, as well as to let people see how prairie grass grows and what it looks like.

Our guide for the Wagon Ride told us she was in Nauvoo last fall when they did the burn.  In September, this grass will be higher than your head and tinder dry.  To clear the land, they set it on fire.  It burns so quickly that the field is reduced to smooth burned ground in a matter of seconds.  She told us that an out of control prairie fire can move at 70 miles an hour.  So, the person who coined the phrase that gossip travels faster than a prairie fire knew what they were talking about.