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Women on the Frontier has always been a learning event for women re-enactors and their families but also draws visitors to learn and watch the women as they try their hands at new frontier skills.
Here visitors learn and listen. As the women churned butter they sang in time to the churning. According to fort interpreter Emily Burns there was a song for everything. It made the time go faster while doing repetitive events and also lightened the spirits of the settlers that worked almost non stop through their days.
Songs like “pop go the weasel” sung by children today refers to a spinners weasel. A weasel consists of a wheel which is revolved by the spinner in order to measure off thread or yarn after it has been produced on the spinning wheel. The weasel is usually built so that the circumference is six feet, so that 40 revolutions produces 80 yards of yarn, which is a skein. It has wooden gears inside and a cam, designed to cause a popping sound after the 40th revolution, telling the spinner that she has completed the skein.
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