Today, Saturday, May 5, 2001, April, Jared, and Zach McGinness and April's best friend Sarah Wolfhope enjoyed an unusual field trip. We traveled about 10 miles to McLean, Virginia, but we traveled back in time about 225 years to visit a working colonial farm from 1771! The Claude Moore Farm at Turkey Run is a year-round living history demonstration of a low-income tobacco farm family. You can see a big version of many of the pictures below by clicking on the photos with red outlines. They'll open in a new window. Here's your first view of the Moore home as you come up the path through the tobacco fields.   The kids helped Grandma churn butter and then separate the excess water out. They also helped grind the coarse salt. You can barely make out one of the roaming hens between Grandma and the house.    Below, Rachel shows how to card wool and spin flax into linen thread. All the people we met and spoke with were completely 'in character' and spoke in an authentic, 200-year-old manner as though they were the real people they portrayed.     Leah, below, hopes to find a husband soon . When asked if she would marry for love or for convenience, she seemed flustered and stated that her only aim was to find a man who would take care of her.   You can see Zach and Suzanne just inside the door. The family here knows nothing of "current" events in Philadelphia and thinks things "are just fine" with England, even though it's just four years until the Revolution.     The kids also learned how to make farm cheese, and then rested on the "worm fence" after their exhausting chores.   Here's the pasture filled with buttercups.   "Here Cow . . .!"   If you ask the kids, "Waddle ya think of Colonial farm life?" they'll say it was no turkey!!   BACK to Adventures in Learning Home