Mystic Seaport - Mystic river scale model exhibit

This model is an amazing creation that's been put together over the last fifty-five years that is forty feet long by 12 feet wide and it's about a one mile stretch of the town outside here, Mystic, Connecticut, as it looked like in the mid-eighteen hundreds It shows the vast array of shipping and shipbuilding that went on in this area. All the ships that are in this model are known to have been built here or visited here in that period. A workshop has been created for the scale model volunteers where we have our tools and store materials and a nice work area where we create some of the models that go in here. It is 40 to 60 hours for each house. A complex building like downtown might be several hundred hours and a complex ship model could be a thousand hours or more. And when you consider there are almost 200 buildings and ships in this model, you get an idea of the scope of effort it took to create it. In the last several years we have added a number of wagons with horses and people and presently, I've just finished building a new TT-scale locomotive for the train tracks across the southern end of the model. I like getting down close looking in across the model, especially down the streets between the buildings, comparing them to the photographs from that period. You can really get a feeling that you're there. If you want to see a few great exhibits, this is one of them.