Historic village of Cumberland

I went last May to Buckingham near Ottawa, on the border between Quebec and Ontario. The weather was nice. As I didn’t know the region at all, I looked on my GPS to find a place to visit as I had a day off. It showed me a historic village.

Fond of history, I like to remember how our ancestors, not so long ago, lived in this country. So I programmed my GPS and followed the road … which led me initially to Masson-Angers where I had to take a ferry to go to the other side of the Des Outaouais River, to Cumberland more precisely. A few minutes later, I was at the historic village.

The touristic season just began so the village was relatively empty. I have been warmly greeted by hosts, all very generous with their knowledge and kindness: the lady at the grocery store, the old lady in the garden, the printer, the blacksmith and others.

Cumberland Heritage Village Museum contains a treasure of some 19,000 artifacts that tell the human Ottawa past beyond past history books. English and French speaking.

This village has been reconstructed by collecting ancestral houses located in several places in the region. It is therefore not an original old village but it shows well how our ancestors used to live. Dozens of buildings are open to the public on a land of 100 acres.

For more information, visit their web page.

The train station at the entrance of the village	The old board schedules on which the station master wrote with a chalk
Old houses	General store
The general store with cans, teas and other boxes containing food … at old time!	The “mops” (left, white), brooms, forks, watering cans and washboards
Herbs ready to be planted and some flowers	The hardware side of the general store, more for men 😉
The school	The unique classroom
Teacher’s desk	An old barn behind a century-old house
A row of student desks with the stove that heated the room, at the left back	The cabinet with the slates and notebooks
The printery	Manually printing machines
Cabinet with drawers that contain thousands of letters that were used to create the newpapers and a newer machine that automatically created letters	Click this link to view a short video where Steve explains how printing has been developed since the days when a newspaper was created letter by letter…
Old tractor	Old car and old tractor
Blacksmith	Click this link to view a small video of the blacksmith in action
Barn, sawmill and carpentry	Piglets have a rest in the courtyard of the barn …
Carpentry	Carpentry
The tractor let the motor of the mill turn	Garage
A nice family home	Its kitchen, avant-garde at the time with a stove (bottom front of the window), in addition to wood stove
Antique washing machine and wooden shapes to dry wool socks	Universal bread maker (1904)
One of the first sink with taps with running water	Chapel
Inside the chapel	Click on the image to read
Back of the train station	About the train station

Photos and videos : Dominique Jeanneret

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