The historic part of Nauvoo is set up with original houses and shops that you can tour to learn about the early pioneers and their way of life. Senior missionaries and sister missionaries dress as pioneers and have learned weaving, making candles, spinning rope, etc., and they teach you about it. Here’s the official website if you want to check it out for yourself: Historic Nauvoo. In the few hours we had, we only toured three buildings, but we learned about:
Baking,
Spinning cotton, wool, and flax to make thread for clothes,
Making candles by dipping a rock and string in animal fat and drying it layer by layer,
Weaving on a loom to make rugs from scrap material,
Making rope by manually spinning smaller strands on a wheel,
And dancing and theater in pioneer times.
This is my favorite picture of Nauvoo.
We will definitely have to make another trip to see the rest of the sights. If anyone is coming this way or wants to do a Church History tour with us, let me know. We can do Nauvoo again (about 9 hrs away), Far West, Palmyra, the Sacred Grove, Carthage (8.5 hours), Independence, or Adam-ondi-Ahman. Since we’ll be here for five years, we should take a trip to all of them.