Mystic — Outside, the wind was blowing and it was 2016.

But inside the Denison Homestead Sunday afternoon, a wood fire kept the air warm, and it felt more like 1717. The staff and volunteers at the historic home had organized a Thanksgiving-themed celebration, and starting at lunchtime people started to trickle through the side door in the hopes of traveling back in time.

The smell from the wood stove made time travel seem plausible. Volunteers dressed in 18th-century petticoats and white caps over their hair, cooking soup over the fire and heating cornbread made from a centuries-old recipe.

Right in the entrance sat a samp pounder, a kind of large mortar and pestle carved from a tree stump by one of the residents of the house as it was passed down through the generations from the house’s original owner, Capt. George Denison.

It would have taken four days of pounding dried corn kernels to make enough corn meal for a loaf of bread, Kate Davis, a descendent of the Denison family and a volunteer at the homestead, told visitors.

The house was occupied by Denison's descendants until 1941, when Ann Denison Gates died and it became a museum.

The house sits on more than 100 acres originally granted to George Denison. Another house once stood there, but it burned to the ground and a new structure was built in 1717.

Throughout the house, other artifacts of 17th- and 18th-century life were placed just so, looking like someone had just put them down — a loom in the corner looked ready to weave new clothes and silverware set on a dining room table were put in place for dinner.

In the parlor, members of a Lebanon historical re-enactment group recited the history of Thanksgiving.

“In 1941, Congress finally decided on the last Thursday of November,” Cecilia Giella told an attentive man from her perch in front of the empty fireplace. She handed out a small copy of a 1788 Thanksgiving Day proclamation given by Samuel Huntington, the governor of Connecticut at the time. 

For all the volunteers’ efforts, the modern world crept in. A bag of Sargento grated cheddar cheese and a box of Ritz crackers were briefly left on the table beside the bowl of cheese spread. A mom ushering her child through the house quickly took an iPhone out of her pocket.

A Domino's pizza delivery person arrived at the door, clearly at the wrong address and baffled by the people in colonial dress.

Pizza wasn't on the menu, anyway. The soup, and 18th-century dishes like quaking plum pudding, were.

"It looks good, it smells good," volunteer Dorothy Brower said as she oversaw an effort to arrange the wood — chopped right on the Denison homested property — to the proper place in the fireplace. "I think the soup is going to be fine."

m.shanahan@theday.com