Oldham County

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Oldham County, Kentucky Colonial Trade Faire 2019

Photos by Kathy Cummings

Each year the Oldham County History Center holds it’s Colonial Trade Faire. This year colonial skills were demonstrated throughout the History campus. There were demonstrations on spinning, weaving, flax breaking and other fabric skills. Providing clothing for a family was a full time job for early Kentuckians. With no ready sources available families would plant their own crops like flax, harvest it and prepare it for spinning. Wool arrived a little later on the frontier but the process was similar. Raising sheep, shearing and then spinning the wool. After the wool or flax was spun into thread then the weaving process began. With large frontier families (necessary for field work) entire families took part in clothing production. Young children were tasked with simple skills of combing and preparing the wool for spinning. Older children took their turn at spinning while adults completed the cycle with weaving the cloth. Both men and women shared the spinning trade.

Oldham 19

Historians are always looking for more details on the Colonial period. To that end a popular part of the Colonial Trade Faire is the presence of authors talking with visitors and signing their books.Always a crowd favorite, Eddie Price will return this year with copies of Widder’s Landing, One Drop-A Slave!, An Unlikely Trio and two illustrated children’s books. Also attending will be Randell Jones, a noted North Carolina author of several non-fiction books including In the Footsteps of Daniel Boone and Before They Were Heroes at King’s Mountain and local favorite Bob Thompson, author of Hitchhiker: StoriesFrom the Kentucky Homefront. Authors only on hand on Sunday include: Sue Kelly Ballard, author of My Blessed, Wretched Life: Rebecca Boone’s Story, and Terry Foody, author of The Cherokee and the Newsman.