By LESLIE KELLY
Kitsap Week
Set aside the hustle-bustle of the holiday season for just one night. Turn off the computers, the televisions, the smartphones and the tablets.
Put on your Sunday best and venture out to Seabeck’s Old Mill Town, to celebrate the holidays the way they would have been in the 1860s.
The Kitsap Historical Society and Museum is again presenting Old Mill Town Christmas on Dec. 14, beginning at 4 p.m.
The location is at the Seabeck Conference Center, in Seabeck, where, in the mid 1800s, everything was all about logging.
Enjoy the fun, beginning with a hay ride. Stop to sample roasted chestnuts and mosey on to the Meeting House to dance the Old Virginia Reel with the Kitsap Kickers.
Following that, a typical pioneer-style Christmas dinner will be served in the century-old historic dining hall. The family-style dinner will include herb-rubbed pork tenderloin, clam chowder, corn fritters, cheddar biscuits and root vegetables. There’ll be corn pudding and apple pie for dessert.
After dinner, learn what life was like back then through the stories of characters “Marshall Blinn, Fred, the lumberman and Jim, the forester.”
Blinn, who will be played by Chuck Kraining, executive director of the Seabeck Conference Center, founded a mill in Seabeck in the 1850s. He came from Maine to look at the area and decided it was just the right place to start his mill which went by the name of the Washington Mill Company.
“Blinn was known to be a teetotaler,” Kraining said. “There’s a great story about how he burnt down a bridge so his mill workers couldn’t cross it to get to the saloon to drink.”
Indeed, Blinn was known for preaching abstinence.
“He was a man whose family was steeped in a tradition of sobriety and morality,” reads “Seabeck: Tide’s Out, Table’s Set” history book.
He took away the management of one rather racy hotel, tore it down, built a new one and offered it free to anyone who would run it on prohibition principles. He also ran for Congress in 1869 on a morality platform, but lost, and then left town.
Rather ironic, Kraining’s office at the conference center sits right near where Blinn built the mill’s Meeting House in the winter of 1864.
Logger Fred Just, a longtime resident of the Seabeck area, will speak about what his job was like as a logger. He’ll explain terms like “whiskey punk, donkey punches and skid row.”
And he’ll teach the crowd logging songs such as “Walk a Logger, Walks a Man.”
Also on the program is Jim Trainer, a forest expert who has written several books. He will speak about what the native forest looked like and which trees would have been milled and which would not.
His talk will include information about forest animals including cougars, bears, eagles and skunks, all which were in the Seabeck area in the mid 1850s.
And he’ll speak about “bent cedars” which were used as a way of marking trails.
The festivities will end by everyone caroling with members of the Bremerton Symphony Chorale.
The event will include small gifts for the children and adults can enter to win a gift basket filled with delightful goodies and holiday treats.
Reservations are required and can be made by calling 360-479-6226. Cost is $30 for adults, $15 for children ages 4 to 12 years, and children under 3 are free.
About 150 people are expected to attend.
