The Great Abolitionist, John Brown, lived in Richfield in the early 1840s. When he first came here with his wife and many children, they lived in a log cabin located at the north end of the Farnam farm. They later moved into a post and board house on what, on maps of the era, was still called the Newton farm but was actually owned by Farnam. That house was close to the S. E. corner of what was later named Brecksville & Streetsboro Rds. On the N. W. corner of the intersection was the stagecoach building, and on the S.E. corner stood the Congregational Church (the third church est. in the Western Reserve). Next to the church was a large buggy building for the parishioners to park their buggies on a Sunday morning. When John Brown would step out the front door of his home to go to work at his tannery (across the road and just north of the stage house) he would see the tannery, the graveyard where his four children were buried, the stage building, the church, and the buggy building. We have now ‘re-created’ what that building looked like. Most of the museum’s large collection of buggies and wagons now stand in that space. It looks a great deal like what The Great Abolitionist would have seen every day. Of special note in the collection of buggies is one built at the Ely Buggy Works of Elyria, Ohio. The Ely family (founders of Elyria) gave that buggy to friends on the occasion of their wedding. There is also a Studebaker buggy. It is one of the last buggies the company built before they began producing Studebaker cars. There is also a two-wheeled, steel wheel military cart, used to carry supplies in the period before WW1 (we have only been able to locate just three other carts like it in the U.S.). And there are also, of course, a number of sleighs and Amish hacks, buggies, and surreys.
Engines of the Museum
We’ve been collecting engines for quite some time now. Before electricity, you had a choice of wind power, hand or foot power, animal on a treadmill power, steam engine flat belt power, or early gas or kerosene engines of various horsepower (first invented in the 1870’s) to help you get your chores done.
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A particularly onerous weekly job was washing clothes. The family’s clothes cleaner, usually the lady of the house, had to work hard to keep the family in fit clothes. There were scrub boards, hand-cranked washing machines, or cone-shaped agitators that looked a bit like a bathroom plunger. They were all hard and back-breaking work. Then, finally, in 1914, small gas-powered engines were invented to do the chore. A woman’s life was changed profoundly. It was all so much easier, and really quite liberating. The most popular was Maytag one or two-cylinder engines. It would turn a belt that would run the washer. What a relief.
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Or simply pumping water for cooking or once a week baths was either really hard work or relied on the wind to turn the windmill. And the wind blowing was not really very reliable. An engine made washing anytime much easier, and much more on-demand. Most homes required the burning of several cords of wood a year just to stay warm, and more was used for cooking. Cutting firewood was a huge amount of hand labor with a hand saw or axe, it was much easier with a powered saw. Grinding grain by hand to make flour, ditto. Pumping oil from the ground could not happen without engine power. The list goes on and on. Life in America became so much easier with the invention of engines. Their importance can hardly be estimated.
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The museum has all these types of engines. They are on display “for sale” at the feed mill. Just as they would have been 120 years ago. They are interesting to look at, and make an interesting picture to take and keep.
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P.S. We also have a very large gathering and display of all eras, and kinds, of washing machines, in the top of the main barn. They are well worth the look.
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Sheep shear of Clayton J. Stanford
Today the museum received a long-term loan from the Peninsula Historic Society. They had simply run out of space for all the tools they had, so they asked if our farm museum could house and display the sheep shear once used by Clayton J. Stanford of the Peninsula Stanfords. P.H.S. had, a number of years ago, originally received the machine from the Emmett’s of Richfield. Dan Emmett (now long passed) had raised sheep for years on their farm in eastern Richfield, on the ridge overlooking Penninsula.
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In the 1800’s our area was famous for raising sheep. We had great soil, pastures & water, an ideal climate, and ready ways (with the Ohio-Erie Canal and later the railroad) to ship the very important wool back East and even on to Europe. Some of the most important families of Richfield and Peninsula kept sheep, including the Oviatt’s and Farnum’s (with their multi-thousand head flocks) of Richfield, and later the well known and important Stanford’s of Peninsula. They were all founding families of their new born towns in the Western Reserve. By the 1840’s, sheep were so popular in the area that one of the world’s foremost authorities on sheep, John Brown (The Great Abolitionist) moved to the area.
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Here at this farm and museum, we have long been interested in sheep raising, ever since we learned the trade from the then aging Carter Wilmot some 60+ years ago (he may well have learned the trade from locals who knew John Brown). Every year for decades we have raised and sheared sheep, with a consequence that when we established the museum we naturally began collecting sheep equipment and tools. In our collection, the museum has early hand shears, wool tying boxes, hand-cranked flexible shaft shears, a hand crank carding machine and several sets of hand cards, and hoof trimmers. But we did not have the earlier articulated straight shaft shear machine. So, now that we finally do, it is time to set up another museum display. ~Which is pretty good timing. We have a number of fleeces of grease wool (a fleece as shorn before any processing). And just this past week we cleaned and washed some wool. All are now on display.
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W. Mullins Basket Shop
This Summer, the museum was given three buildings. The owner wanted to build something new, but that township gov’t wouldn’t allow any new construction until the old was gone. While that seems an example of government overreach, it was lucky for the museum. The buildings are now at the museum. Two of them will become a future church with steeple. The first one moved is now the basket shop.
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To deconstruct it we first took off the asphalt shingles and then the roof boards and rafters. We cut the corners and laid the sides down. Then we backed up the trailer and laid several boards for ramps and simply slide the walls onto the carry-all. Once home we stacked all the pieces parts in the driveway parking area, and built the foundation, and pulled (lots of) nails from the roof boards. When all was ready we carried the walls over to the foundation and over the course of several days stood them up and nailed them together. We then cut a number of 5 to 6 inch trees and, once the bark was removed, bolted them to the top of the walls, -which considerably strengthened the building, and provided very nice looking rafters for hanging the future baskets. We then restored the roof beams and boards, then finished it all with slate shingles & paint. ~~A couple month’s work and the basket shop was born.
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The building is now filled with lots and lots of baskets, basket making tools and equipment, and basket materials. There is also a Civil War-era tin and wood bathtub, for soaking dried white oak splints to make them more pliable for basket making. And we acquired a lovely old desk from a Smithville residence, with name and date inscribed on it on one of the inside drawers (it really should have stayed in Smithville at their museum, but they wouldn’t spend the money to save it). There is also a number of nearly ancient wood splint and cane bottom chairs the museum had acquired over the years, and a quite nice wood barrel, wrapped in wood splint bands, that is used for holding strips of bark for future baskets. For the steps into the shop, we used a (probably) one ton 8 ft. long sandstone block that had once been one of the foundation stones for the now lost Babb’s Apples barn, and an 8′ granite curbstone that had once graced the road in front of the Brecksville Stage Coach Stop. The basket shop sign over the entrance door came from a 19th Cent. basket shop in England.
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When the shop was done, I just couldn’t help myself. It wasn’t quite right. So I added a brick floor open-sided porch to the north side of the building. Under the porch roof is now displayed a Revolutionary War era cannon, a nitre kettle, and a very large cider press. The building and shop and porch now make a fully functioning and nice-looking display. ~~We have already had fun making very creative baskets.
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P.S. -Baskets for sale at Fryburg Gen’l Store.
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Mike J. Hotz Blacksmith Shop.
For a number of years now, I have had a problem. The first two blacksmith shops had inappropriate floors. Blacksmithing includes a good deal of fire and sparks. There’s always the danger of accidentally catching something unintended on fire (not to mention the smith himself). The building, where the shop had been located for a number of years, had a wooden floor. I oft times worried about a stray spark smoldering to life after I had left the scene.
Now, finally, there is a “new” Mike Hotz Blacksmith Shop. I took down a barn over on Brecksville Rd. and used some of the beams to build an addition to the side of the original shop. The addition has a brick floor. It feels wonderful to have such freedom to create and fix with no worry. There’s no longer anything to catch fire.
Now when you visit the “new” shop you can ask about firing up the forge and try your own hand at shaping some metal. You can see up close some of the many tools that helped build America. Or you can even try lifting the 150 lb. anvil or the 100 lb. vice. You might also notice the various hand cranked blowers or the pre-Civil War wood and leather bellows that resides in the rafters.
~~One other note: One time I was talking with an old-time blacksmith. I particularly liked an anvil he had. He looked at it and said, “That’s not an anvil. That’s a family”. I didn’t get what he was saying at first, so he explained. Going back several thousand years, to the earliest metal workers, if a man had an anvil he could make a good living. The anvil and what it enabled him to make would keep him and his family alive. An anvil would be passed down thru families for generations. Well used, they will practically last forever. The oldest anvil in this museum probably dates back at least 200 years, but who knows, it might be a bit older than that. –And that is a whole lot of family’s.
Newly Arrived Doctor in Town.
~From the Richfield Gazette.
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“A new doctor has moved to Fryburg Village. Dr. Rielly, late of New Jersey, has moved his medical practice to Fryburg, seeking increased opportunities away from the bustle of the East Coast. He served with distinction during the recently successfully concluded war. He brings well-practiced skills in family medicine and field surgery. He attended medical schools in both New York & New Jersey and has an additional degree in dentistry from The Philadelphia Dental School in Pennsylvania.
We welcome him to our town. We have missed having a doctor, since Doc. Wagner’s recent passing. Doctor Rielly has established his practice in the former Abbyville School House, across from Fryburg Gen’l. Welcome, Doc., to our town.”
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~~~ I began collecting doctor equipment for the now established doctor office when the Summit County Historical Society donated a deaccessioned dentist chair. At about the same time I went to look at possibly moving a one-room schoolhouse over in Youngstown. While at the school I climbed a very rickety ladder to take a look in the attic. As I crawled across the bending ceiling joists, I came across a pile of medicine bottles. How they got there, or why, I have no idea. I took off my shirt and pulled loose a hanging wire to use as a rope and began lowering the bottles to the floor below, where the building’s owner unloaded them. After the many bundles were sent down, the cache was safe after so many years waiting to be discovered. My half of the discoveries are now at the doctor’s office. Somewhat later on I found a wood exam table, and a Civil War-era leather and wood dentist chair. I also stopped by an older lady’s home where she was having a sale of her parent’s belongings. I purchased a doctor’s bag and other equipment from her, then I noticed the outdoor sign for her father’s office, “Doc. Rielly. Physician & Surgeon”. She donated the sign and his medical diploma to the museum. Most recently a wheelchair has been donated. It dates to the 1860s, is made of wood and wicker, and is full-sized for a man or largish woman. It may have been used by a veteran of that time and war. I also have two, foot-powered dentist drills, and several dentist school graduation diploma’s I retrieved from a dumpster at a farm. Another thing I particularly like in the office is the straw tick bed. Many years ago I used to visit an old-time antique dealer (he’s long-closed now). One visit I found a very old straw tick (which is a sort of 6-foot pillow stuffed with straw) in the back corner of his shop attic. They were an early form of mattress. It fit nicely on a narrow day bed I also acquired years ago. I’ve been collecting equipment for the office for some time now, and I’m very happy to be able to finally display it.
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Doc. Wagner was the much loved Richfield doctor who died in the early 1950s. He had made a late-night emergency visit, and on his way home fell asleep. He did not survive the crash at the bottom of Hinckley Hill on 303.
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J. I. Case Threshing Barn
A basic foundation of human culture is the achieved ability to grow, harvest, and store grain (which was later used to make porridge, breads, and mead or beer). The museum now has a new exhibit of how that was accomplished. The whole history of the tools of threshing and combining is now displayed in the J. I. Case Threshing Barn.
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Among the earliest grain gathering tools were simple handheld curved knives, called sickles. Gathering a bunch of grain stalks in one hand and cutting it free with the sickle in the other was back-breaking work. Those early curved knives eventually evolved into long-handled knives, called scythes. Scythes made the labor much easier and faster by allowing the gatherer to stand upright, and swing the scythe in a long sweeping motion that cut much larger quantities of grain stalks, without being very uncomfortably bent over with a sickle. The cut stalks were then gathered into piles by a second person, and then picked up and carried to a collection point.
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Then scythes improved again to become cradle scythes or a scythe with several long sticks attached to create a ‘cradle’ to catch the cut grain stalks. The harvester of grain could then take several swings of the scythe to cut larger quantities of grain, and then dump all the cut grain into one pile. This made the follow-up gathering much easier. The second person could just pick up the pile of grain stems, wrap a couple of loose stems around the pile and create a tied bundle of grain called a shalk or sheaf. These shalks were then arranged throughout the field into rain shedding piles.
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The next step in grain production was removing the grain from its stalk. The earliest way to do this was to use a flail. A flail was a simple long wooden handle with a free-swinging attached shorter wood piece. Folks would gather the grain from the field and place it on a building floor or large cloth and use the swinging flail to beat the grain seeds from the stems. Then the separated grain would be placed in a winnowing basket and tossed in the air to allow the wind to blow the grain chaff away in order to clean the grain for use.
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Later machines were invented that made the separating and winnowing much easier. Among the first of these was the J. I. Case hand-powered threshing machine. An operator turned the crank, which in turn turned a drum that had spikes or teeth on it. A second person then held the bundles of grain stems against the drum and the fingers plucked the grain from the stem.
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A second machine soon followed called a fanning mill. A fanning mill was also hand-cranked. The plucked grain, which was still contaminated with stray dirt and chaff, was poured into the top of the mill. As the handle was turned, the grain fell onto screens that shook back and forth to separate the grain from dirt. At the same time, the large wooden fan at the back of the machine blew air across the grain to remove any chaff. The cleaned grain then fell through the machine and was gathered in a box at the bottom of the fanning mill. The introduction of these two machines greatly sped up the production of grain for feed and food.
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With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, threshing became even more easy and efficient with the invention of flat belt/steam engine powered stationary threshers, and then tractor-pulled and powered combines that did all the work at one single pass through a stand of grain.
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All the machines and tools of threshing can now be viewed at the J. I. Case Threshing Barn at the museum.
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E. Palmer Woodworking Shop
More changes have come to the museum this Summer. With the building of the “new” blacksmith shop, we have decided to turn the old blacksmithy into a wood working shop.
We built a dividing wall in the 30×20 (former) Hotz building, creating a larger front room for the 19th century tools, and a smaller back room for the more modern equipment that is used when more speed and ease is needed in construction
We will name the new shop “E. Palmer. Woodworking. Casket Making.”
Ebenezer Palmer was a close friend of the Great Abolitionist, John Brown, when Brown lived in Richfield. They used to spend late nights talking about the Underground Railroad, The Bible, and the doings of the Church they attended together. When Brown’s four children died of Diphtheria within days of one another, Palmer built the four caskets in which they were buried. Palmer spent nearly his whole life in Richfield and built many of the older houses that still stand in Richfield and surrounding communities.
The woodworking shop contains many of the same tools Ebenezer would have carried in his tool box, as he walked in the early morning hours to the next house he was building. Also on display are two very rare pit saw blades that were used to saw lumber before a saw mill came to Richfield. It was amazingly tough work hand sawing or hand hewing all the lumber needed for barns, sheds and homes before steam or water powered mills were built. Ebenezer Palmer and the other men of those days, shortly after the founding of Ohio, were far tougher than the men of these more modern times.
Fryburg Cycle Co. ~C. V. Vessele -Cycle Agent
Stop by to visit the latest shop at the museum. It’s modeled with the Wright Cycle Co. in mind.
The Wright Bros. began selling bicycles in 1892 while continuing to run their print shop. By 1896 they started designing and manufacturing their own bike models and used the bicycle profits to finance their first aviation experiments. (The museum’s bike shop is in the same building as the future museum print shop.)
When I was much younger, I rode my bike every day, all winter, all summer, every day. My friends and I often used to ride our bikes the next county over to visit (play) at Whipps Ledges. I like bicycles. For quite a while now I have been wanting to set up a bike shop at the museum. But I never had quite enough old cycles to do so. Then we decided to visit my sister Beverly in Chicago. When we got there she said we could have (my brother-in-law) Carl’s, bike. Carl had planned on restoring it, but just never quite got around to doing so. The bike is an 1896 Crown and has wooden fenders, wood handlebar, wood wheels, and a wood and string chain guard. -It was a ladies bike and the chain guard with crossing strings was necessary to keep a lady’s skirt safe from entanglement (no proper lady of the time would ever have worn pants).
So, with the other bikes and children’s wagons and scooters I had collected over the years, bike shop time had finally arrived. The most famous bike shop of all American history was the Wright Brothers Cycle Shop. So I modeled our shop a bit on the style and set up of the Wright’s shop. It’s been a fun project and may be one of the more interesting shops in the museum. Be sure to notice the 1903 wheel alignment machine sitting on the table. It was donated to the museum and came from the Elyria Cycle Shop. The bike in the shop’s window is an 1890 Rev-O-Noc, which also sports wooden wheels.
While construction was proceeding, using bits and pieces from several old buildings including the flooring from the Hamburg Horseshoeing shop, I came across several old bike shop signs. One of them named the shop’s owner as “Cycle Agent”. So in honor of the wonderful donation of a fantastic bike, I have named Carl Von Vessele as Cycle Agent of the Fryburg Cycle Co. He may be the best guy I have ever known. I miss him.
What’s in a Basket?
Have you ever wondered about shopping carts? Everyone uses one if they are buying more than an item or two when they grocery shop. They are practically as common as cars. But where did they come from?
Before their invention, folks just carried a basket or bag to tote their intended purchases to the checkout. But store owners began to notice that often purchases were limited by what a shopper could carry. They wanted to sell more, so they tried several solutions. One grocer installed a raised 15″ wide track on which shoppers could push a wheeled basket. It was something like a RR track. It proved wildly unsuccessful. Other owners tried hiring helpers who would carry groceries for the customers. The help would carry the full baskets to the counter then take another empty basket to the shopper. This was also quite inefficient and sometimes confusing. Other grocers tried little pull carts that looked much like a child’s toy wagon. But pulling your groceries behind you and bending down to load and unload the conveyance also proved a poor solution.
Then one day in 1936, Sylvan Goldman was sitting at his desk in the office of one of his Humpty-Dumpty grocery stores and noticed a folding chair. He took the idea of a new kind of cart to one of his store’s handymen, Fred Young, and Sylvan and Fred worked out the design & kinks so that it was steady and wouldn’t tip over or unexpectedly fold up. Thus the (nearly) modern shopping cart was invented. After a short struggle to get the public to accept the carts (many men said they could carry their own baskets, thank you very much, and some women had had enough of pushing something that resembled a baby carriage) but it didn’t take long for the new shopping carts to prove very successful and were soon used in groceries across America.
If you would like to see (and use) one of the first grocery carts ever made, stop by for a visit at the museum Gen’l Store. We have two on hand, given to the museum by Gary Strietlow, who had collected the carts many decades ago from a closed meat market in Cleveland.
“New” Tin Shop
September of 2018 I had the opportunity to save as much as I could of a barn over on Brecksville Rd. The barn was once the centerpiece of one of the many old-time farms along that road. It had been moved there many years ago from another earlier farm. Now it was time to move it a third time.
That barn has always interested me. I remember long ago when it served the farm, then more recently (getting near 40 yrs. ago) when it was rented out as a used furniture store, tools, and knick-knack store. I liked that store. I used to get many useful items there. But the barn was in decline, and the owners weren’t much concerned at fixing it. When the store closed the barn sat unused, except for a local gent who parked his trailers and a 1933 Whippet car there. The fire department eventually burned down the old farmhouse, and the barn followed these several years later.
It has been very sad for me to watch as our once thriving and vital farming community disappears. Driving down pert near any road in the area I can still picture barns, homes, and farms no longer there. But I suppose the current mayor of our community likes big flashy glass and steel buildings. She has certainly seen to a fair amount of destruction of what they like to call “The Historic District”. They fly nice flags proclaiming such on the telephone poles in town, then they tear down another house or building in a succession of now lost historic treasures.
But, at least a bit sometimes gets saved. I pulled out as many 8×8 beams, roof rafters & boards, siding, floorboards & joists, and windows as were still usable. And those nearly ancient parts have been reassembled at the museum as the “new” tin shop, a portico to the collar shop, and as a dividing wall in the “new” woodworking shop. I just wish the benefits to the museum didn’t come at the cost of our town heritage.
The Tin Shop is a nice stop on the tour of the museum. It is filled with the tools of the trade from 150+ years ago. And there are lots of pieces of tinware just as great-grandma used. It is a very interesting look into what was utilized as containers before plastics came along. Of particular interest is the long table that sits under the windows. That table was once used at Taylor Elevator in Cleveland. 120+ years ago, that company built the elevator, for Queen Victoria, that is still in service in Buckingham Palace today.
Early October at the Museum
We have many photography groups come to the museum for outings. We of course ask no charge. We simply appreciate them enjoying the museum and the many opportunities it provides for great pictures.
Hamburg Horseshoeing & Jobbing
This past week we have been working on building the Hamburg Horseshoeing & Jobbing Shop. Some years ago we were given a carriage building. A century ago it had protected the buggies at the Wall Farm in Sharon Center. The building has been stored under a tarp, these several years since its move to the museum, waiting to be re-erected. I just needed to decide where to put it.
The building had originally been built on a slope. The foundations and bottom sills had stepped down the slope, so it really needed to be put back on sloping ground to accommodate its original configuration. But I just didn’t have the right spot to put it.
Then last week the obvious finally became apparent. The oddly shaped building would fit nicely, attached to the side of the Hotz Blacksmith. The fall of the ground was just right. So at last up it goes. The original beams & rafters once again joining together to provide space and protection, as they had for so long at the Wall.
The new shop is attached to the west side of the original Hotz building, with a 12 foot opening into the basement. The lower level of the Hotz now contains all the museum’s scrap metal. That makes a very large and convenient storage area for the necessaries of future projects and art.
We leveled the floor of the new shop with 8 tons of gravel (all moved by wheel barrow). Then we hauled 4 very heavy truck loads of bricks from a former parking lot in Cuyahoga Falls. It made a great looking and fire proof floor for all the cutting, welding and smithing common in a blacksmith shop. It’s already made metal working much easier than was possible in the old shop (our first project was making iron railings for the new barn bridge).
The upper level of the wooden floored Hotz Blacksmith Shop will soon become a wood working shop. Part of every day is already spent there, working on the many needs of the museum.
Clock Shop & The Hampden Table
When I was quite young, first grade or so, my younger sister and I used to walk a long way down the gravel road to visit Mrs. Garman (back then there was almost no traffic and nobody worried about “stranger danger”. Before the freeways, Richfield was a very sleepy little farm community.). She was in her nineties or so, and lived alone. Her husband Howard was passed, her daughter also gone, her sons long since moved on. She had given up her chickens. The farm was sold. She was alone. -Except for her clocks. When you walked in her back door, there were ticking clocks everywhere. It was quite a wonderous sight for young eyes. It must have taken her some time to get them all woundup every morning.
I’ve often wondered if that experience caused my lifelong liking of old windup wall and shelf clocks.
Several years ago a fellow came along to do some trading. I had a Soap Box Derby car that didn’t fit the museum and he had clocks. Lots of clocks. Soon I had clocks all over my house, just like Julia did. But even better, he had a clock maker’s table. I didn’t know it at the time, but that table was to reveal quite a story.
Back in 1864 John C. Dueber founded the Dueber Watch Case Company in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1888 he bought the Hampton Watch Co., then moved both companies to Canton, Oh. There the combined company grew to employ 10% of all Canton workers. Unfortunately, by the time of the Great Depression the company failed from lack of sales. But a quirk of fate was to give the once thriving company a second, then third life.
Communist Russia needed watches (I suppose when you want to lead worldwide revolution your army needs to know what time it is). They tried to buy several watch factories in Europe, but the Europeans wouldn’t sell to them. So the Soviets turned to the U.S. They settled on Hampden. Soon 28 train car loads of equipment and parts were on their way to their new home outside of Moscow. It proved to be so important that when the Nazi’s invaded Russia, the factory was packed up once again and moved farther into the Russian interior.
So now, ninety years later, the Hampden (renamed the First Moscow Watch Factory) still produces watches. While back home in the States, all that remains of the once mighty employer of so many Canton residents is the single watch maker’s desk now residing in the museum’s new Hampden Clock Shop.
The Old Landis, in the “New” Shop
I received a call a few years ago from the daughter of a gentleman in the nearby community of Brecksville. Her dad had reached the age of letting things go. He had a 700 lb. sewing machine he wanted to see go somewhere safe because it had had so much meaning to their family. I said I’d come take a look. They had a Landis Model 12 Series E shoe sole sew’er.
Back before the Great Depression, Grand-dad worked in a shoe repair shop in Cleveland’s Near East Side. When the economy crashed the shop went out of business. Granddad lost his job, but saved the shoe repair machine. He took it home and put it in his basement and began fixing shoes. As the Depression wore on the whole neighborhood began bringing their old shoes to him to be fixed. Nobody could afford new. All through the hard times he kept his neighbor’s feet properly attired, through the several years of snow and rain and heat, receiving little in return. There just wasn’t money. But a good and helpful friend he remained.
Unfortunately, as sometimes happens, when good times returned the neighbors stopped going to him and spent their money at the bigger established shoe stores. And he was left poor, -forgotten by those he had helped.
It was interesting to go over to the family home and listen to their story of Grand Dad, and hear how badly the third generation still felt about what had happened. Sometimes in some families events echo for a long time. Grand dad had given so much almost a hundred years ago, and received so little in return. It all still remembered by his family.
The Landis now stands, once again useful, in the “new” Peter Allen Harness Shop. And with it is told another small story of a single man, caught in the great sweeping changes of his times.
P. S. Allen Harness Shop
Most every town had a harness shop at one time, some towns several. Richfield’s most well known shop was run by Peter Allen. It stood at the corner of Streetsboro and Broadview Rds.
These days, early in the 21st Century, harness shops have become quite rare outside of Amish communities. There was an old gentleman in Richfield who repaired harness and tack out of a small “yard” barn behind his house, until he finally retired in the mid ’90’s from his almost hobby like work. And years ago there was a harness shop over towards Wadsworth. But now, if you need something repaired, you have a choice of traveling north an hour to the Amish communities around Middlefield, or go south an hour to the Amish shops in Holmes County. We almost always go south. We have many Amish friends there, and we still have quite a number of Amish relatives in the Charm area (our great grandfather’s farm was just south of Charm).
We have occasion to visit a number of harness & buggy shops down in the area, but our favorite is found along a long dirt road, south of Kidron. It’s run by a really nice gentleman who is there when he’s there, and isn’t when he’s not. When he’s not, you can go on down the “drive” another half mile or so to his farm. I asked him one time why he walks such a distance to go to his shop and he said he didn’t like to bother the horse. So then I asked why he didn’t ride a bicycle since it would be so much easier. He got the strangest look like he couldn’t figure out what I was talking about, then finally replied that the Bishop of the house church didn’t allow air filled tires.
Over the course of years I’ve known him, he has done a great job of repairing and oiling the many sets of museum harness I have brought him. He’ll never be wealthy, he charges very little, ..in part because he only works for Amish (and me). I have also bought several other things from him, including a old, old (but still usable) heavy duty, leather sewing, treadle sewing machine.
But now, at long last, the museum has it’s own harness shop. In style, look and use it greatly resembles the Peter Allen Harness Shop that operated from 1880 to 1908 in Richfield. Along the long wall are a series of windows with a sewing machine at each light. There is a large trough for dipping harness in Neats Foot oil. In one corner is a stack of trunks for sale, just as Peter sold trunks. Down the center of the shop is a nearly ancient table that has served for years as cutting and assembly bench for harness. And hanging from many metal hooks around the walls are nearly countless sets of harness and tack collected from now long gone area farms including the Mueller, King, Sebecky, Knopp, Krone and Morris Farms ..and of course others. I have wondered about all the horses that had labored under those sets of leathers. I have seen a few old pictures of a couple of them, even heard their names. But now, they and their masters are long gone and only the harness remains.
I’ve spent most of the last two weeks in the “new” shop, …carting in equipment, getting it running, sorting and hanging tack. It took a couple hours just to attempt to sort, match and hang all the many hames the museum has collected. Hames come in matched sets, fitting and clamping to each side of a horse collar. Then the harness attaches to the hames so the horse can pull its load. I have several dozen of the (sometimes all wood, sometimes all metal, sometimes wood and metal mixed) devices. But I could only find three matched sets. I have no idea what the farmers I got the hames, halters and harness from did with the other half of so many of the hames.
I’ve also added quite a number of shoe and boot making tools, machines and lasts, including an eight foot long shoe fitting, grinding and polishing machine. It’s rather uncommon to see those machines anymore. People just don’t much have their shoes repaired these days. Imports have made new (but much less long lasting) shoes and boots cheaper.
Another couple days and it’ll be a great and interesting shop to visit. It’s a nice step in time, with the rich smells of oil, the creak of leather, the chatter of the treadle sewing machines, and the hundred year old brick floor, …all housed in one of the oldest remaining barns in Northern Ohio.
Love of a Farm
The Story of My Family’s Farm -as told by Juanita Taylor
My mom was a World War II war bride. My dad was a Navy pilot. After the war Dad remained in the Navy, and our family lived the adventure of traveling every two years across country from post to posting.
It was a wonderful life, but one thing I always longed for was a home in one place where I could watch my friends grow up and go to the same school (I moved 18 times between birth and high school). Luckily we did have a home base between our many moves, my mom’s family farm in Cooksville, Illinois.
The farm has been in our family for 5 generations. It was established in the 1880’s by my great grandmother and grandfather. My grandmother was born on the farm. My mother was born on the farm. I have my mother’s and grandmother’s bedroom set in my home in Richfield. Its 240 acres is currently farmed by my cousin and his son. My aunt still lives in the farmhouse. It was always home to me. It still is.
I get excited every time we approach the farm when we plan a trip to visit family. The deep rich soil, the soy beans and corn growing so tall and green. My aunt’s beautiful garden. Her home cooked meals. The welcoming comfort of the farmhouse. Sleeping in the bedroom my mother slept in as a child. The farm has been a part of the rhythm of my life.
Whenever we went to the farm, my sister and I would head for the attic. Even on the hottest summer days, we’d climb the stairs, open the attic hatch and breathe in the heavenly stuffy stale air that was released as we entered that attic. We always opened the old trunk first – loaded with clothes, a scrap book my grandmother put together in the 1890’s, and little treasures like needle cubes, handmade lace and postcards. We also found out about a long hidden secret involving our family that we weren’t supposed to uncover (you never know what you’ll find in an attic).
My love of old things started at the family farm. I dreamed of living in my grandmother’s time: walking to school and attending the one room schoolhouse located down the road from the farm; imagining the love story blossoming between my grandmother and grandfather (he grew up on the farm closest to my grandmother). I collected anything my family didn’t want from the farm. And I have collected many antiques that I thought would have been a part of our farm.
When my husband and I were about to be married, we decided we both wanted something outside the city with a little land and a century home. We now live in a home built in the 1840’s, have a little over 3 acres with a buggy barn, and a 38 acre preserve in our back yard with paths and a pond. For us it has been heaven.
As we age and are ready to divest ourselves of some of our possessions, we could think of no finer place than Stone Garden Farm & Village to pass on a number of our antiques collected over the years. Some are from our family farm in Cooksville, Illinois. Others have been collected in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. We know the Fry’s and the museum will treasure them as much as we have. Those simple things of such beauty and use that reflect a simple hard working life on a farm.
Juanita Juarez Taylor
Nitre Kettle -The Pot That Won the War.
Human history and the art of war was forever changed with the invention of firearms. Gunpowder made it happen. The availability, or lack of, gunpowder often meant the winning or loss of a battle. In American history this was most important early in the War of Independence. At the Siege of Boston, the Colonials were able to trap the British forces on the then peninsula of Boston, and eventually to force the British to retreat to Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada. It was the first great battle of the Revolution, and allowed the Americans the self confidence to pursue the war and eventually gain independence. But, at one point during the nearly 11 month siege, each of the Colonial troops were down to their last 1/2 pound of gun powder. Had the British known the sorry state of supplies they surely would have attacked and won the day, and perhaps have ended the revolution before it had barely begun. Fortunately, as the Colonials became better prepared for war, supplies of gunpowder became more available.
Gun powder is composed of salt peter (potassium nitrate), charcoal and sulfur. When gun powder was first produced there was no science to explain why it worked. People just knew that mixing its parts together produced a powder that exploded. Because there was no chemical understanding, the recipes for its production varied widely, and was especially dependent on the quality of it parts, most particularly the quality of the salt peter.
Sulfur and charcoal are easy, they can be dug or produced in abundance. Salt peter is another matter. It is produced by the mixing together and rotting of plant material, manure, and urine for a period of usually six months. Salt peter (niter) crystals precipitated out of this mixture and were then gathered, then refined. Or, salt peter can be gathered from certain caves, most commonly located in Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky and Alabama. Dirt from the caves was dug and placed in large wood troughs, then water was poured over the dirt to extract out the salt peter or niter.
But the key part of the production of the salt peter was to mix it with water and cook it in kettles to further refine it. Without the kettles, it couldn’t be refined enough to make effective, reliable gun powder. Without the kettles, the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War may have had very different outcomes.
Shortly after the Civil War the chemical industry became much more sophisticated and much better explosives were developed. And the once so important kettles were no longer needed. There are very few left, with most long forgotten or consumed in the scrap metal drives of the World Wars.
There are several still in caves located within National Parks in the South. The DuPont Chemical Co. has two kettles (used by the DuPont’s in the early days of their company) which are displayed at their museum on their original manufacturing grounds. And there is one of these now very rare, and once so important, kettles at this museum.
A Studebaker Buggy, ..and the Ely and Gest Families of Elyria
The museum received a fantastic donation today. An all original Studebaker buggy.
Elyria was founded in 1816 (just 40 years after the establishment of our nation) by Herman Ely from Massachusetts. He came to the Western Reserve on horseback and built a log house close to the Black River (close to where Original Peoples were camping). He also built a dam, gristmill and sawmill on the site. The sawmill was built near one of the waterfalls and they used the lumber to build more houses to accommodate immigrating settlers. Just 36 years later, when Mr. Ely died in 1852, Elyria had five churches, three grocery stores, three flour mills, a newspaper, and a population of more than 1500 people.
At the turn of the century, the Ely family owned a buggy. They had acquired the buggy from Elyria Equipment Company, in Elyria. The family gave the buggy to the Ingersol family who used it for a short time. The Ingersol’s then gifted the buggy to their friends, the Gest’s, when they were married about 1910. The buggy was used by the Gest’s until they gifted the buggy to their grand daughter (the oldest sister of Richard Wise) on the occasion of her wedding in the late 1960’s. Eventually the buggy skipped back up a generation to Richard’s parents, who stored it for a time in a barn in Belden. About 1990 it went to a cousin, and finally Richard acquired the buggy in the summer of 2017. He kept the buggy in his barn in Wellington.
The 108 years of the Gest/Wise Family ownership of the buggy finally ended in Feb. 2018 when Richard and his daughter, Wendy, donated the buggy the museum. Their donation completed the buggy’s journey from the original seller (the Elyria Equipment Co.) to its first owner, the Ely’s, and eventually to the Gest’s and to their descendants. The museum has never seen such a well documented buggy.
Buggies and sleighs from before the turn of the century always had small brass tags marking their builder. But for those conveyances that have survived to present day, the tags have almost always been removed by “tag collectors”. It’s rare to find the original maker’s mark on either. It’s even more rare to find a tag bearing the name of the seller of the equipment. In fact, I’ve never seen or even heard of one. But this wonderful buggy bears both, …probably because one family has owned the buggy for nearly all of its life. But there they are, Studebaker Company, South Bend, Ind. and Elyria Equipment Co, Elyria, Oh.
Mystery at the Museum -Magic Lanterns
Several days ago I decided to set up a camera display in the (new) Gen’l Store. The museum has had a number of them in storage for several years, and it was time to get them out. But when I got to looking at them they didn’t seem right. So research began, and I was soon to discover that the “cameras” were actually Magic Lanterns. And thus began a whole new field of learning I had known nothing about. –That’s one of the things I like so much about the museum. There’s always new things to learn, ~about things that are old.
Very few people these days know what Magic Lanterns are. But not so long ago, before computers and cell phones, before movies or TV, before the Silent Pictures, before there were even very many photographs, …there were Magic Lanterns. Just a bit over a hundred years ago, Magic Lanterns were the most common and well liked form of entertainment in the U.S. By some estimates there were 50,000+ traveling road shows of the projected pictures. And then they suddenly disappeared from use, and even disappeared from memory.
The magic lantern was an early type of image projector, developed in the 17th century. It used a concave mirror behind a light source to direct as much of the light as possible through a small rectangular sheet of glass – the magic lantern slide – on which was the painted or photographic image to be projected – and onward into a lens at the front. The lens was adjusted to focus the projection on a screen or wall.
Initially, candles or oil lamps were used, producing very dim projections. Improvements in lighting took the form of the Argand lamp from the 1790’s, limelight in the 1820’s, electric arc light in the 1860’s and finally the incandescent electric lamp.
The art of projection reached a high-point in the 1870-1880 period, with the magic lantern playing a very important part in Victorian society. Temperance and religious lectures were given, they were used in education, they helped in the demonstration of scientific principles, they helped relay the latest news of world events, and were used to create ‘phantasmagoria’ shows. By this time, images were being transferred to slides by photographic means, and then colored by hand.
One of the most interesting early uses of the lanterns was during church or religious gatherings. At the front of the sanctuary, or meeting room, a screen would be set up. A Magic Lantern was placed behind the screen so it could not be seen by the congregation. In the darkened church, at the point of the sermon most warning of the dangers of the devil, the lantern would be turned on showing a picture of a monster or some other evil being. The projectionist would then very quickly move the lantern away from the screen, causing the projected image to appear to grow larger. This would cause an effect of the monster charging at the crowd. And many folks were terrified. With reportedly much shouting, crying and even some repenting. An even scarier effect could be achieved by projecting the image on a cloud of smoke or incense, which would cause the devil to appear to move and waver.
Magic Lanterns brought wonderful lessons and entertainment to the public. They showed folks the many wonders of the world. They brought people together, unlike the many devices of today. They were fun and they are certainly missed by those few remaining who remember them.
-You can see the museum’s Magic Lanterns on display at the Gen’l Store. And if you ask, maybe we’ll turn one on to show you how they work.
A Bag of Charcoal
Several years ago someone donated a number of items which were immediately incorporated into various displays. –Except for a bag of charcoal of which I hadn’t really paid much attention. At casual glance it hadn’t seem to “belong” anywhere. So it has lingered in a corner, waiting. Till today. Today I looked again and realized what it was.
Henry Ford began producing Model T cars in 1908. By 1914 the Ford Motor Company was producing thousands of cars a week and just 5 yrs. later Ford was selling a million T’s a year. Each car required 100 board feet of lumber for the running boards, frame, wheel spokes and the dash board. Ford was using so much wood in the production of Model T’s that he wanted to go into the lumber business for himself.
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Every year Henry and his friends (including inventor Thomas Edison, naturalist John Burroughs and tire builder Harvey Firestone) went on a camping trip. They traveled in a six car caravan which included a full mobile kitchen. They called themselves the “Vagabonds”, and their well publicized trips made camping “cool” for the American public. For the 1919 trip, Henry included Edward Kingsford (a cousin-in-law) because Henry wanted to talk with him about buying forested land in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Shortly thereafter, Ford bought 313,000 acres, where he built a sawmill, a parts plant and a company town he named Kingsford.
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The new mills and factories were soon producing all the wood parts needed, but there was a great deal of wood scrap and saw dust left over. Mr. Ford abhorred waste, so applying an invention of Orin Stafford (a chemist in Oregon) Henry had the waste wood turned into charcoal, which was then pressed into briquettes using corn starch and tar as a binder.
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At first the briquettes were sold for use in meat & fish smokehouses and for home heating. But soon supply outstripped demand. Henry then created a brand new business of bagging the charcoal and selling it at Ford car dealerships for use during picnics or camping. The idea of family cookouts became so popular (in part because of the Vagabonds) that shortly Ford was selling “Picnic Kits” that contained grills and charcoal, and bore the slogan: “Enjoy a Modern Picnic -Sizzling Broiled Meats, Steaming Coffee, Toasted Sandwiches.”
Ford Motor Company Charcoal eventually was renamed Kingsford Charcoal, which is now America’s most popular maker of charcoal. The company uses a million tons of wood a year making it’s ever popular product.
Henry Ford not only invented one of the most popular cars ever sold, created one of America’s most successful businesses and invented the revolutionary assembly line, …he also changed American life and leisure by making possible and popularizing the great American barbecue.
—(It’s fascinating how even the most seemingly insignificant artifact can lead to such interesting history. Glad I looked at that bag of donated charcoal again. It turns out it had quite a story.)
Why We Don’t Charge Admission to the Museum.
We have been asked a number of times why we accept donations, but do not charge admission to the museum.
We see our “mission” as several fold: We really like saving historic buildings. We believe it is extremely important to save the tools and the knowledge of how to use them, of the many 19th Cent. trades. We feel it is also just as important to preserve the stories of family and farm life in the Western Reserve of the 19th Century. ….And we believe we should share all this wealth of history with as many folks as possible. That is one of the primary reasons we do not charge for visits to or use of the museum.
Our thinking on this question began to be formed over the many years I worked at another local historic village. Over a thirty year period I worked there a number of times. I ran the Wood Working Shop. I did general maintenance, and made repairs as needed to the Church, Jaeger House, Stow House, the farm barn, saw mill, and other buildings and displays. I also helped build several buildings including the Herrick House. At another time I built the administration offices in the basement of the visitors center. And I received a private contract to paint several of the houses. —There was virtually nothing I wasn’t intimately familiar with, or helped build. And yet, one time when I stopped by for a quick reminder of how one of the cabins was built, I was told I couldn’t go on the grounds. I needed a ticket. Thirty years of working there (off and on) and I wasn’t welcome.
This is something I never want to have happen here at Stone Garden Farm & Village. We want all folks to be welcome. And even more we want all folks to discover our American history, as it was lived by our ancestors and saved by us, not as a monetary transaction but simply shared by all. Let the public come to at least one place to learn and experience our Nation’s common story, without paying for the “privilege”.
–P.S. About those “donations”. Over the years we have been very grateful for all the many donations the Museum has received. Folks have given us many tractors, pieces of horse drawn equipment, furniture, buildings, washing machines, a fire truck, innumerable other things, …and sometimes even monetary donations. And, of course, many friends and acquaintances have donated untold hours of help. For all of it, we are most appreciative. It’s much of what helps this museum thrive.
Gas & Kerosene Pumps.
Before cars became popular there was much less use of oil based fuels. Some gasoline was used to power hit or miss engines, but most gas and kerosene was used in lamps (The first commercial use of gas was in 1865, when Charles Gilbert and John Barker partnered to build the Springfield Gas Machine that boiled gasoline into gas vapor to allow gas lamp lighting in homes and buildings.).
There were no gas stations. Just pumps often standing on the porches or in front of Gen’l Stores. Many early pumps had a simple clock face gage to measure the number of gallons pumped. But that soon became unpopular because customers could not actually see how much gasoline was being delivered. As towns grew and travel increased, folks less often personally knew the gas seller, so trust oft times came to be questioned.
The earliest pumps had a handle that when cranked would pump gas out of a storage tank directly into a hose, then hence directly into the car gas tank. Because of the problem of sometimes maybe not trusting the seller to give a fair measure, some folks took to carrying a measured can which they would first have the gas pumped into, then pour the can contents into the car gas tank.
This proved unwieldy, so a new type of gasoline pump was invented, often called visible globe pumps. These improved pumps would first deliver the gas into a gas globe that sat on top of the pump as the handle was turned. Then the clearly measured gas would flow down a hose to the customers can or tank.
The Museum now has two early clock face gas pumps, and one early kerosene pump, whose gage would measure one gallon, 1/2 gal. and 1 qt. at a time. They can be seen at the museum’s Gen’l Store.
The Bartelemy, Lyford & Ailing Coverlets, …Tied Beiderwald Woven, w/. Jacquard Attachment.
~THE BARTELEMY/FULMER COVERLET, -FIVE GENERATIONS OF CARE.~
The Museum had a happy event the other day. Kyle & Carol Morison stopped by. They brought a beautiful coverlet, woven in 1847 by Jacob Bartelemy of New Britain, in Stark Co., Ohio. (Jacob is listed in the famous reference book on coverlets, “American Coverlets and Their Weavers. -Coverlets From the Collection of Foster & Muriel McCarl”.)
The red, white and blue coverlet is a Tied Beiderwand (which is a German term referring to the structure of the weave). The coverlet was woven using a Jacquard Attachment on the loom instead of using the much more commonly used heddles & harness. Jacquard equipped looms were almost always owned and used by full time, professional weavers and are now quite rare, with the few remaining examples in museums.
(The Jacquard Attachment was invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804. It enabled looms to produce fabrics having intricate woven patterns. The loom was controlled by a number of punched cards laced together into a continuous sequence, or “chain”. Multiple rows of holes were punched on each card, with one complete card corresponding to one row of the design. This mechanism is probably one of the most important weaving inventions as Jacquard shedding made possible the automatic production of unlimited varieties of pattern weaving. The term “Jacquard” is not specific or limited to any particular loom, but rather refers to the added control mechanism that automates the patterning.)
The coverlet remains in wonderful condition, in part because it has been so carefully protected by the descendants of the Fulmer Family. The Fulmer’s lived on the family farm in Greentown, Stark Co. (midway between Akron & Canton, Ohio). They purchased the coverlet directly from Jacob Bartelemy, in 1847. It was then handed down to daughter Belle Fulmer, hence to Merle Fulmer Ford, then to Ramona Ford Morison, to Kyle & Carol Morison, and finally to the Museum.
~THE LEWIS/LYFORD COVERLET. -A FAMILY’S HISTORY, THE HISTORY OF AMERICA~
A number of years ago I received a phone call from Louise Lewis, wife of Robert Lewis. They wanted to know if the Museum was interested in a barn beam loom. According to the family history written by Caroline Hutchins Lewis in 1941, the loom was made in the late 1600’s (more than 100 years before the American Revolution) by a member of the Lyford family of Brookfield, New Hampshire. The loom was used by generations of the Lyford’s, until its last use by Betsy Lyford Hutchins. During the Civil War, she wove the red, white & blue coverlet which now resides in the Museum collection. The loom was then stored in the Lyford farm’s barn for a number of years, and finally moved to the attic of the farm house. The loom eventually was bequeathed to Caroline Hutchins Lewis, who moved the loom to her home in Baltimore, Maryland in 1941, during WW2. 72 years later her son, Robert, donated the loom, pictures, coverlet and written history to the museum in 2013.
~THE FRY COVERLETS. -A TWENTIETH CENTURY FARM FAMILY~
My family, the Fry’s, have been raising sheep on the family farm in Richfield Twp. for 62 years. When my brother, sisters and I were young, our parents used to take the sheep’s wool down to the Aling Wool Mill (later named Rastetter Wool Mill) near Kidron, Ohio. Ailing would clean, card and weave our wool to our request. During a number of the early years of the farm’s wool production, our family choose to have coverlets made, each of a different color, and with a pine tree pattern around the edges of the coverlets to denote our raising of Christmas trees (1956 to present) on our farm. Each of us kids received a coverlet in the color of our choice. The Museum now counts Jim’s brown coverlet and his parent’s blue coverlet in the museum collection. The other still family owned coverlets are yellow, red and green. {Note: Rastetter was to eventually close its doors in 2002. Several years later when they sold the building, they donated several hundred balls of rug fabric to the Museum.} –Also pictured are two additional coverlets from the museum’s large collection.
~~For more information about American Coverlets, we recommend visiting or calling The National Museum of the American Coverlet, in Bedford, Pa. They are most helpful and wonderful folks.~~
The Stills of Stone Garden.
The Whiskey Rebellion (also known as the Whiskey Insurrection) was a tax protest in the United States beginning in 1791 during the presidency of George Washington. The so-called “whiskey tax” was the first tax imposed on a domestic product by the newly formed federal government. It became law in 1791, and was intended to generate revenue for paying the war debt incurred during the Revolutionary War. The tax applied to all distilled spirits, but American whiskey was by far the country’s most popular distilled beverage in the 18th century, so the excise became widely known as a “whiskey tax”. Farmers of the western frontier (primarily Western Penn. & and what would become eastern Ohio) were accustomed to distilling their surplus rye, barley, wheat, corn, or fermented grain mixtures into whiskey. These farmers resisted the tax. In these regions, whiskey often served as a medium of exchange. Many of the resisters were war veterans who believed that they were fighting for the principles of the American Revolution, in particular against taxation without local representation, while the federal government maintained that the taxes were the legal expression of Congressional taxation powers. The Federal Gov’t was finally able to impose the tax on “Spirits” makers, but many folks continued on with making their own, untaxed and privately used or traded, brew.
Years later, the Federal Government again decided to regulate alcohol, this time much more severely. Prohibition was declared law of the land from 1920 to 1933. No one was to make, use, drink, transport, …alcohol. Again, many private Americans decided they could live their lives better without Federal laws and intrusions. Many folks made their own.
It’s been interesting over the years to visit and explore once productive, now abandoned, farms. It has been especially interesting to discover the things those “old time” farmers left behind. Some years ago I received permission to collect the equipment left on a farm in Strongsville. There was a tractor and all the equipment, nuts and bolts galore, chicken feeders, signs that read “Silver Queen Corn -For Sale”, and more. It took me a couple days to move it all, but eventually I was finished, ..except for a final look around. I wanted to make sure the old guy hadn’t parked some last equipment along one of the line fences. So I walked towards the rear of the property, and discovered in the middle of a back field a dense crop of trees. It seemed a bit strange, so I got down on hands and knees and crawled in to see what was what. And there in the thick patch of cover was a hidden building. You could not see it from outside the copse. In the building was a still. That guy had been using his extra Silver Queen to brew a batch now and again. I’m sure it was a lucrative product to sell with his eggs and hens and sweet corn.
Since then, the Museum has collected many stills and heard numerous stories of farmers making a living by producing something many people want, –even if the Gub’mint says it ain’t lee-gal. Our large collection of stills and liquor producing equipment can now be found on display in the “new” Gen’l Store.