30/30 Challenge - Day 12

So I know this challenge is supposed to be about getting out in nature and I did have to walk about  a km to get here but todays pictures are about Britannia Shipyard. Its a museum of buildings left over from the days of fishing and canning fish that was the lifeblood of Steveston. Many minorities came here for work and were underpaid and overworked. These buildings show how life was in those days.

I find this picture to be of interest to me as I live in a converted net shed. I always wondered what a working one looked like. This is a picture of nets being stored in shed. Interesting to me as I always assumed the nets were folded and stacked.

 I am not entirely sure what this building was used for but it is representative of how all the buildings were built on pilings over the water.

Looking through the door of the boat building shed



This building was the housing for native workers. Cant have been very nice in there, there isn't even one window!

I find the construction interesting as the boards on our house run horizontally not vertically like this workshed.

Murakami House
The house was built in 1885 on piles over the marsh. The Murakami family - ten children, mom and dad, lived in the residence from early 1929 to 1942. It was literally only a step from home to boat works. The family built 1-2 gillnet fishing boats per winter and fished in the summer. At launching time, temporary tracks were placed over the boardwalk to roll the boat out. A hand-operated capstan moved the cradle on these tracks that are called "the ways".

This is the garden beside the house. I love that even though its not a huge plot , it incorporates three different fruit trees.

The bathtub in the house is what is called an Ofuro. You would wash your self down with soap and water while sitting outside the tub, then when you are clean ,you get in and soak. The wooden box in the right corner contains part of the heating element. The precursor to modern day hot tubs, the tub is deep enough to submerge the whole body, not like our shallow tubs of today.

I love this handmade broom.

The laundry organizing area. Must have been a full time job with twelve people in the house.

A view of the village back in the day, wooden boardwalks were built over the marshy area for people to get around.

 

Stilt houses built over the water.

Looking inside the house. I love these kinds of exhibits to get an idea of the tools and appliances that were used when there was no electricity. This is living off the grid for real! This would have been housing for some senior management type of family.

Love that washing machine!

The fridge!

 

This was the single guys house, 4 guys sharing one bedroom and a kitchen.

I love the Asian antiques in the Chinese bunkhouse

The sleeping accommodations were atrocious. I wish someone else had been here so I could lie in a bed and show you how small these really are. A small child would find one of these bunks crowded. Not long enough to stretch out, not wide enough to turn over in your sleep, and surrounded in every direction by other sleepers with no privacy or any real storage for personal items. The mattress such as they were, was a burlap bag stuffed with who knows what and some scratchy wool blankets to cover with.  My bones ache just looking at these beds. I wouldn't have lasted a week here!

Saw this heron and some ducks on my way back to the office.

A memorial to the Japanese workers at the fishing Canneries that lined the river front.

 

I hope you enjoyed the tour, even though it wasn't outside. I think the way they lived was more in tune with nature and more sustainable than the way we build and waste things these days. I'm sure life was more physically demanding but the lack of TV and internet meant they had more time to do these things and were probably in better shape for it.

 

 

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