History came alive for Beaufort County fourth-graders. Students from the county schools visited the Bath Historic Site for Heritage Days.
Heritage Days offers students hands-on demonstrations about life in the colonial times. Bath has held Heritage Days for local students for at least 20 years, said Bea Latham, assistant manager of the Bath Historic Site.
There were stations that taught students to write with a quill and make a toy. Students learned how to make rope and use a saw.
Goose Creek State Park did a station about the wildlife in that period.
Latham manned a new addition to the event. She had a wheel of history, a trivia game with a spinning wheel like the Wheel of Fortune and facts about North Carolina history.
Latham said she enjoyed watching the children make the distinction between fact and fiction. For instance, all knew that Blackbeard had his head chopped off, but many wanted to believe the myth that his body then swam headless around his ship three times.
D.J. Irving, a student at Northeast Elementary School said he enjoyed the station that taught him how to build a toy because he worked with his friend on the project.
“He didn’t know how to do it. So, I had to teach him, myself,” Irving said.
He and classmate Mckenna Beacham tried their hands at sawing wood shortly before leaving. It was Beacham’s favorite station of the day.
“It was fun to get the experience of what the colonial people had done,” she said.