Black Creek Pioneer Village: Toronto's Living History Village

Julie Rekai Rickerd is a Toronto-based broadcaster and public-relations
consultant.

Amid the speed of modern, daily life, history tends to be forgotten, if
ever acknowledged. Black Creek Pioneer Village, located on the outskirts
of Toronto, recreates “life in early rural Ontario” to illustrate
how life was lived in the province not that many years ago.

Forty-one furnished buildings, most of them original, on the 56-acre
site offer visitors an authentic journey into the past. “Villagers”
in appropriate period costumes go about their lives as they would have
in the 19th century, cooking, baking, weaving, shoeing horses, shearing
sheep, tilling and planting using equipment and implements of the time.

The text describes and photographs illustrate the history of the
buildings and artifacts, and the lives of the families who inhabited and
used them. This book is an excellent guide to the village, as well as a
useful tool with which to teach the history of life in the early days of
rural Ontario.