Historic Eastfield is a recreated early American village, and home to the Annual Series of Early American Trades and Historic Preservation Workshops.
Historic Eastfield Village is not a museum; there are no ropes or glassed-off exhibits. Founder Don Carpentier collected the more than twenty buildings and their contents to serve as a laboratory, allowing Workshop participants the opportunity to study, handle and utilize thousands of architectural elements, tools and typical artifacts of the late 18th-early 19th century.
Studying here is meant to be an immersion experience. Students and teachers live in the Village during their courses, experiencing first hand the daily lives and work of the tradesmen of the pre-industrial age. Meals are cooked in the late-18th century kitchens. Accommodations are rope beds with straw & feather ticks. Most evenings there are gatherings in the Briggs Tavern and lively conversations in front of a blazing fireplace.
The experts and master craftsmen who comprise the faculty are leaders in their fields, and the Annual Series of Workshops maintains the highest educational standards. Students are a mixture of novices, whose interests may be their own old houses, and museum or industry professionals, who are looking to expand their specific skills. This combination offers a dynamic opportunity to share and learn.
Historic Eastfield Village was painstakingly assembled by one of the foremost preservation arts experts, Don Carpentier. It is the campus for the Annual Series of Early American Trades and Historic Preservation Workshops, a nationally renowned program of lectures, symposia and hands-on classes.
The not-for-profit Historic Eastfield Foundation was established to ensure that Don Carpentier’s passion and vision are carried on into the future.
The purposes of the Foundation as set forth in its constitution are exclusively educational in nature:
1. To train men and women in a range of early
American trades and historic preservation skills;
2. To encourage craftspersons and preservationists
in their efforts to save the technology of the past;
3. To produce publications, specifically a periodical
and single-subject publications, and prescriptive
audio-video materials, and symposia for both the
general public and a professional audience;
4. To develop a collection and library appropriate
to early arts and trades and historic preservation;
5. To develop a long-term plan for continuing
the goals and purposes of the Foundation.
6. To maintain facilities necessary to further the Foundation’s
educational objectives.
Annual Series of Early American Trades and Historic Preservation Workshops
