June 26, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
Photograph by Richard Howard
For more than 20 years, museum leaders and novice hobbyists alike have flocked to the School of Historic Preservation and Historic Trades at Eastfield Village, a 14-acre property in East Nassau, N.Y., that is modeled after America circa the early 19th century.
There, program participants brush up on their skills in masonry, millwork, and other restoration and crafts techniques common in that era but nearly forgotten in modern times.
In 1971 Donald Carpentier, a self-taught potter with a bachelor’s degree in historic preservation, accepted his father’s offer of property on the family farm and began to search for and acquire local 18th- and 19th-century buildings that were condemned or abandoned.
He has restored the 28 buildings that now make up the nonprofit Eastfield Village, where trades such as carpentry, tinsmithing, printing, and shoemaking are taught to hundreds of students each summer.
It costs between $35,000 and $40,000 a year to run the classes, and most of the group’s income is raised through tuition. Many of the classes cost from $200 to $550 and take place over a period of several days, allowing students the opportunity to live on-site to experience the daily living and working conditions of pre-industrial tradesmen.
The accommodations, which don’t include electricity or running water, feature rope beds filled with straw and feathers, and primitive kitchens that mirror those found in the early 1800s.
Here, a workshop participant slices vegetables for a meal prepared for students on a traditional hearth.
