plantation review

I love going to the Agrirama,  especially around Christmas. It would have been better if it had not been 80 degrees today. It’s more fun when there is a little nip in the air.  But no nip this year.  I remember, a couple years back, they had an area where you could shoot with a musket loader by taking aim at a wooden  rabbit. My husband showed his marksmanship, by nailing the wooden rabbit right in his little wooden head the first shot. I was impressed! This year, I enjoyed watching the sugar cane grinding (which brings back memories of my childhood) and the assembly of musicians that were on the porch of the Gibbs house. The Gibbs House belonged to the family of my daughter-in-law and has an interesting history, as all of these houses do.  Built in the early 1800’s, the homes at the Agrirama were donated by various families living in and around the area.  The mule in the picture was a rescued from the Katrina disaster, as he had been standing in water for eight days before being removed from the area.  He is now a unionized mule, as he only works one hour before he gets a ten-minute break :>)

I love the fact that the Agrirama is a working museum, which is a bit unusual. A working museum is not an everyday type of museum. You can get fresh corn meal and grits that have been grown, harvested and ground on the premises. The people who work at the museum really "work at the museum".  They can be assigned to tend a garden, feed chickens, work on a quilt or make some soap, to name only a few of the many off-the-grid chores.  At the Museum of Agriculture, they had something called a "Dessert Sampler".  People were lined up, out the door, waiting to get some of these old-fashioned confections. There is so much going on and so much history to cover, these few paragraphs is only a thimble full of what could amount to a pond of information. To preserve this and bring the kids here to see, hear, smell and touch some of yesterday, helps those who come, experience that yesterday was very different than today. Here is a link to the Agrirama web site.  A day of pictures at the Agrirama, takes you to my photo album.