We drive past it every morning when Joey drops me off at work in the office downtown, so today with things being slow in the office, I decided to walk over to the Houston Heritage museum in Sam Houston Park and take a tour of the old buildings there.
Saw some pretty nifty stuff and learned a few things I didn’t know. For example: in the mid-1800s, houses were taxed based on the number of rooms, not the square footage of the house, and a closet counted as a room, soo… most houses had large rooms with big bureaus or wardrobes in them, rather than smaller rooms with closets.
Also learned that craftsmen who built furniture would take miniature versions of their products around to show potential customers, who would pick what they want and order full sized versions of those. Soon, customers started buying the miniatures as furniture for their children, or for their children’s dolls, etc.
The docent pointed out in one of the kitchens (Note: kitchens used open fires for cooking, which was a fire hazard, so rather than risk burning the entire house down ,most of the houses from back then had separate structures for kitchens, which were a bit of a walk away from the main house) that the table legs were set in a double-lined brass pot. These pots had an inner and outer moat, with the legs set in the inner moat. The outer moat was filled with sugar water, to attract ants to the pots, where they would get in the water and drown, rather than having the ants running all over the tables (which were used for food prep). Cool!
Anyhow, here are a few photos from in the museum an the outsides of the houses. Worth a visit if you are downtown during their hours!
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