Moving right along, Ms Hemmler asked her young audience to think about what life might have been like 250 years ago, “when this house was new.”

The Matthew Curtiss House on Main Street, built around 1750 and now owned by the Newtown Historical Society, has made a tradition of opening its doors to young children on Veterans’ Day. A speaker usually gives a short presentation in the large, kitchen room at the back near the open hearth fireplace.

“Where did they get their light, food, heat, or clothing?” Ms Hemmler asked, and she read them a story of colonial times called The Ox-Cart Man by Donald Hall.

A handful of raw lamb’s wool was passed around and the children took turns combing, or carding, it to make it smooth. Then Ms Hemmler spun the combed wool into yarn using a drop spindle. The children discussed what kinds of clothing could be made from wool, and how it might be dyed, cut, and sewn.

“How many clothes do you think you have in your closets now,” Ms Hemmler asked.

“A thousand?” said one little girl.

“Children like you in the colonial times would have had only one or maybe two sets of clothes,” Ms Hemmler said, “and they wore them until they wore out.”

Two volunteers were brought to the front and dressed in colonial garb. Ms Hemmler asked what they thought happened to the scraps of material that were left over after the clothes were made.

“They made scarves with them?”

“Yes, and they also sewed them together to make patchwork quilts.”

Each child was given a square of colored construction paper and a bag of cutout shapes to make a pretend quilt square to take home. The glue stick was passed around and they chatted while they worked with great concentration while kneeling on the wide-planked floor, just as children might have done 250 years ago.