Thursday Doors: Still Stuck In The Past

Last week I featured a post on cast iron wood stoves from Black Creek Pioneer Village, and this week I have another door I discovered while I was there.

This semi-underground cold storage area would have been a place of nightmares for me as a kid.  Come to think of it, if I had discovered any kind of creepy-crawly in there, I would likely have been off running – and probably screaming along the way.

These storage cellars would have been important for the early pioneers to preserve apples, potatoes etc over the long Canadian winters.

However, this cellar also reminded me of another storage place from my own “pioneer past” … a old wooden barn with a dirt floor that used to stand on my parent’s property up until about 20 years ago.  It had the same dark, creepy feeling with an undercurrent of I-don’t-really-want-to-go-in-there.

December 1994

This old barn was used by my dad for storing his unending supply of stuff-I-might-need-someday … an affliction suffered by most survivors of the 1930’s and the Great Depression.

Originally, the barn was actually used to house chickens that my grandmother kept and later a horse used for grocery deliveries.  Of course, both were long gone by the time I came along.  I knew it only as a creepy black hole of horror.

I used to cringe every time one of my parents sent me to the barn to look for something. Regardless of whatever it might have been, I never found it … possibly because I never ventured further than the door frame.

… and here I was on a warm sunny day at the Pioneer Village, peering carefully from the door frame into a cold storage cellar that unexpectedly drudged up old memories.

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Thursday Doors is a weekly photo feature hosted by Norm 2.0.