The Laurel Museum was bustling Sunday with candle making, spice grating and other 19th century activities. Girls in long, cotton dresses, pinafores and braids showed younger children how to play Jacob’s Ladder, a popular game back then, in which participants use wooden slats and grosgrain ribbon, one of the few games children could play on the Sabbath in religious households.
It was all part of ‘‘If You Lived in This House in the 1840s,” a two-hour, hands-on event at the museum that taught children what it was like to grow up in an 1840s mill town.
During the early to 1800s, the city was a cotton mill town.
‘‘It was just for the kids to come out and have fun,” said Maggie Hubbard, a volunteer at the museum and a member of the recently formed Children’s Programs Committee, whose members put together Sunday’s program. ‘‘We’d never done it before, so having 18 [kids come] was fantastic.”
The cost of the program, $5 per child, went toward covering the cost of materials, which included pieces of multicolored pantyhose for a finger-weaving activity and wax for the candle-dipping, in which wicks are dunked into tallow or wax to form candles.
‘‘I asked the kids, ‘What was your favorite part?’ and they said, ‘Everything,’” said Laurel resident Lisa Losito, who brought her daughters Juniper, 6, Eleanor, 2, and niece Winter, 5, to the event. ‘‘I thought it was really nice they had the older girls helping. The younger ones really like it when they get to play with the big girls.”
Nika Peden, 11, was one of the older girls who showed other kids how to ‘‘finger-weave,” an old pastime that involved lacing pieces of material around the fingers to form long ropes that could then be sewed into rugs or other items.
Most of the activity was held in the museum’s basement, a restored 1840s mill worker’s home.
‘‘We did soap whittling just like the kids did in the old days,” said volunteer Jean Wilson of Laurel, who sits on the museum’s board of directors and helped out at the event. ‘‘But we used sticks instead of knives, for obvious reasons.”
During a spice-grating activity, kids learned that applesauce doesn’t naturally come flavored.
‘‘Kids who wanted cinnamon or nutmeg in their applesauce grated [the spices],” Wilson said, gesturing to jars of whole nutmegs and cinnamon sticks and a hand-held grater.
Several of the participants, who wore approximated period costume such as ankle-length, plain cotton dresses and soft-soled leather shoes, learned a few hard truths about the way their 19th century counterparts lived. Many mill-working children died of respiratory illnesses contracted due to poor working conditions coupled with inadequate clothing and nutrition. Other young workers were maimed or killed by the mills’ dangerous machinery.
‘‘It was very hard in the mills — a lot of kids got killed or injured,” said Nika Peden, who wore a long, cotton dress and a flowered pinafore. ‘‘It probably would have made me mad [to live in the 1840s] because so many kids were getting killed.”
Finger weaving was Madeline Lilienthal’s favorite part of the event. And she didn’t mind her costume, either.
‘‘I wouldn’t have minded wearing ... the clothes,” she said. ‘‘They’re comfy.”
