Griswold 2009 - Day 2

GRISWOLD 2009 - "GRISWOLDS GO FOR BROKE - THE RECESSION TOUR" - DAY 2

After some morning church and yardwork, we set out today on the second day of our prolonged Griswold 2009 vacation. After a nice lunch at Kelly's Roast Beef in Saugus, MA, we headed to Saugus Iron Works National Historic Site.

In the mid-1600's, the Puritans came to Massachusetts set on practicing their religion away from the increasing cultural wildness of their homelands. They realized early on that if they wanted to establish and sustain themselves in the new world for an extended period of time, they were going to need iron, so they searched eastern Massachusetts looking for a suitable spot. After a failed attempt south of Boston, they settled on Saugus, MA. Here they built a relatively successful location that functioned for around 20 years.

There were three main buildings in the manufacture of iron as seen in the casting of the property below. The main building on the left is the blast furnace and casting shed. Here the iron was melted at a very high temperature and then released into a kind of trough in the ground where large pieces of iron formed. The building in the middle was the forge, where the large chunks of iron were formed into more workable bars. The building on the right was the rolling and splitting mill where the iron was made into smaller bars and rods, which were ultimately shipped out to blacksmith shops and such. (There was a small blacksmith shop on site.)

Here Anne and Erik are looking down into the top of the blast furnace. It's a long was down!

Here's the inside of the forge building. Note the large bellows behind Erik and Rebecca.

This interesting piece of equipment split flat bars of iron into thin rods. These rods were ultimately used for a lot of things, one very important item being nails.

Here Erik, Rebecca and Steve look out over the Saugus river. This river is currently being cleaned up and brought back to the way it was in the 1600's, or at least to a rough approximation of those days. This river was very important to the operation of all three buildings as water from the river was channeled to waterwheels for each building to supply power.

Here are the forge and rolling & splitting mill as seen from near the river.

Here's the blast furnace from below it.

This is where the molten iron was released from the blast furnace and into the trough in the ground. Some of it could also be scooped out with specially designed tools.

We found our visit very informative and couldn't believe that we've lived in the area so long without ever visiting here.

From the Saugus Iron Works, we headed down Route 1 to a rather visible Route 1 landmark, the "Route 1 Miniature Golf" course.

This course is very visible to cars traveling down Route 1 and is a well known landmark mostly due to this large orange dinosaur that kind of looks out over the highway.

The team of Steve & Erik triumphed over Anne & Rebecca with a combined score of 97. The LOSERS shot a combined 103. We all quickly put our rivalry behind us though and celebrated the event with slushes at the ice cream stand next to the course.

From there, we came home and watched the end of the Red Sox victory on TV. A little later, it was time to fire up the grill for some steak tips. (No...we don't usually eat that much red meat in one day!)

Speaking of "red meat", while Steve was out on the deck grilling, this lovely doe was chomping on green plants in the woods behind our house. We see these deer quite regularly and as long as they leave our garden alone, they're okay.

So Day 2 of Griswold 2009 is in the books. It was a very pleasant, sunny day in the 80's, which was a nice change from the cool and rainy weather that we've had for the past month.

We hope everyone had a very nice 4th of July weekend!