Museum of Western Reserve Farms & Equipment

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.

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

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.

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.)

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 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.

The Museum is open with no admission to everyone who wishes to visit. We are open seven days a week, daylight hours. Certainly during the Winter there are fewer visitors, but for most of the year it is a very rare day folks aren’t touring the grounds.

One of the things we most like to do is welcome historic societies, groups that like to visit historic homes, antique car clubs, woodworking groups, Dowsers, retirement village folks, photography clubs and many others,. Sometimes they come to just look around, and sometimes they will make a day of it with meetings and picnics and talks or lectures. We welcome them all at no charge.

The pictures above were taken this past Summer by a local photography group. They like to take night photos using extended lens exposures and a variety of lights in order to achieve an effect called “night painting”. On this particular, actually quite dark, night they took pictures until 3 in the morning. We were/are glad they came.

We had quite the surprise the other day. We received a post titled “Cabin”. I thought it was someone inquiring about staying here. Instead it turned out to be a wonderful lady, living deep in the heart of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, offering us a cabin. We have always wanted one for the museum, so we were quite excited, even sight unseen. So we went to look immediately. And happy we were.

Years ago a previous owner of the property had collected cabins and eventually ended up with five on his land. We hadn’t known, until our visit that day, that one of the cabins had already been moved into “town” in Peninsula, and had been serving as an occasional art gallery. In recent years I had displayed some of my metal art at their seasonal, weekend long “Cabin Art” shows. I have always really liked and admired that cabin.

Usually folks have an “archetype” picture of cabins. We think of them as being built of large hand hewn logs that took 3 men and a dog to lift and stack for walls. And, in fact, almost all surviving old time cabins are built like that. Big logs could take the weathering of time and season, so they simply lasted longer -even to present day. But the early settlers were coming to the Western Reserve that was deep woods and little else. Building a large house was a future luxury they could not initially afford.

Folks would try to leave the Colonies or original States in the Spring so they would have enough time to make the long and arduous journey, and still have sufficient time to prepare for winter in an unsettled land. The earliest wave of them had a tough trip. Some took canoes or small boats through the Great Lakes then south into the new lands down rivers such as the Sandusky, Cuyahoga and Grand. Others made part of the trip on the Ohio River then north up the branches of either the Muskingum, Tuscarawas, Scioto and Olentangy Rivers. And many made the months long trek overland. But, how ever they came, it was long, it was hard, and many of them never made it. Those who did usually got to their piece of land with summer fast upon them. So there wasn’t a great deal of time to prepare for snow, cold, hunger and want. There was much to do.

A usually small party of people, mostly alone in the wilderness, were faced with myriad tasks. You had to hunt, fish, gather food, pick any available fruits and nuts and preserve them all for winter. You needed reliable water, and stores of firewood. You had to clear land for planting a garden. You needed to provide shelter and food for any animals you had. You constantly had to be aware of and protect against the dangers of wilderness life. You needed to cut and prepare logs. And you really needed to build something to shelter in.

The Peninsula cabin we hope to move here soon is one of those very early cabins.  We were told that it originally stood in southern Ohio. Instead of the large hewn log cabins, it is built of smaller logs that could be more easily handled by a few people. It is small, only 12×12, since there was likely little time to build bigger. And it has a flat roof (which is less efficient but easier to build than a peeked roof). At some point the board or shake or possibly sod roof was replaced by metal, and larger windows were added. Originally any windows would have been much smaller and often covered with oil skin.

We plan to return it to more of its first look and use. We may remove the more recent cement chinking between the logs and replace it with more traditional chink, we’d like to replace the windows with earlier ones, and we’ll place it on a stone foundation, rather than the block used by its previous mover. And the roof will once again be covered with wood shakes.

We admire its original builders for all the tough work they did to just survive. We are very grateful the gentleman who moved it locally and thereby saved it. We are very thankful it was later offered to us. And we are thrilled to have it for the newest addition to the museum. Our thanks go out to the many generations of folks for saving this piece of Ohio history.

Update: July 9th, 2017.

This past Sunday morning we brought the cabin home. Legally you are allowed to transport things down the road that are no more than 10′ wide. There’s a small chance that the cabin might have been just a touch wider that that, but hey, I forgot my tape measure. We didn’t get stopped, didn’t run over any stray dogs and didn’t block any traffic or hit any mail boxes. All-in-all, a rather successful drive home. Now we need to get it on a foundation, build a new roof, and it’ll be ready for visitors.

Last August the Ohio Legislature passed the Ohio Agritourism Law. It says, in effect, that any farm that opens up to visits by the public can not be sued for any injuries that occur on the farm as the result of the normal hazards of farm life. This is a tremendous help to farmers who no longer must fear of losing their farms to the whims and vicissitudes of America’s over supply of lawyers. (To quote Shakespeare, “The first we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.)

The Museum of Western Reserve Farms & Equipment is located entirely at Stone Garden Farm & Village, in Richfield Twp. Our farm, and its museum, are now listed and posted as an Agritourism Farm. We try to make your visit to the museum and farm as enjoyable and safe as possible, but please be aware that visits to any farm carries with it inherent risks due to the many displays, pieces of equipment, animals, fences and tools that are normal to any farm or farm activity (and farm museum). Thank you for your visits and your caution while visiting.

Back in Aug. 2016, Mike Sangiacomo at the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote a long and wonderful article about the museum. These 6 months later it is still having a great effect on the museum. In the last couple of weeks two families, each of whom saw the article, called to donate their family’s treasures.

-David Krone’s family came to the U.S. in 1866 when David was just 9 months old. By 1900 David had established his own farm in the town of Dover (named after the Dover Land Company, who originally owned a huge tract of land west and south of Cleveland. The town was later renamed Westlake because of post office confusion over where to deliver letters, to the Dover near the lake or the Dover farther south.) He married Anna in 1912, and they had 3 daughters. Sadly, Anna died of consumption in 1925. The middle daughter, Eleanor, married Paul Burmeister in 1950 and they also raised their two children, Mark & Mary, on the farm.

Just before her passing in 2009, mom (Eleanor) asked Mark and Mary to never sell or throw away the family farm tools. Her children (now also beginning to approach “senior hood”) cast about for somewhere to donate the treasured goods and eventually found the museum. They loaded up a really large closed trailer and the pickup, and delivered everything. It took a half hour just to unload. When we finished we stood on the barn bridge talking, and Mary and Mark told me some family stories.

Many of the farms west of Cleveland grew grapes. And consequently the farmers produced a certain amount of wine. When the various produce and fruit was ready for sale, the farmers would hitch up the horses and drive into Cleve. They would sell most of their produce and wine to Italians and negroes living on the Westside. In return Grand-dad learned from the negroes to make what became a farm favorite meal, soup/stew made from “junk” meat (pork hock, bacon & other smoked meat), Kentucky Wonder Beans (a long, tough pole bean), and onions. When the sell’n was done, the farm folk would then trade wine with each other to see whose had the best “flavor”. Then the horses would find their own way home, without the benefit of directions from the now happy farmers.

Grand-dad’s favorite horse was Jimmy, a big brown draft. When Jimmy died, Grand-father ( an often rather formal German) put on his best suit to say goodbye. Mary remembered a big black truck coming to pick Jimmy up and take him away. It was one of the few times she saw her grand-father tear up. It was also the end of an era. The family gave up horses and purchased a REO truck that David modified to carry produce, and a 1945 Farmall tractor.

But the rest of the farm continued as was. The “kids” remember still using the cistern and outhouse when they were young. They also recalled how Grand-dad had field tiled all the back field so the ground would be dry enough for growing food instead of cattails.

Eventually, as more neighbors moved in and the now named Westlake built up, the government built offices next door and cut the tiles and caused the family land to once again return to swamp. The family couldn’t afford to sue the big bully next door, so generations of farming came to a close. Finally the farm was sold to the Westlake Methodist Church in 2011, and the equipment was moved to a barn in Columbia Station.

It took a full day to put away everything Mary & Mark had brought from their mom’s farm. The gas stove went to the bakery, the grind stones to the wheel making shop, the harness to the barn, Jimmy’s horse collar to the collar shop, the large kettle to the slaughter house, a hand operated orchard sprayer to the cider mill equipment, the barn doors to the blacksmith shop for building a wall, and so on. Perhaps the single best item (besides the stories) might be the wood cistern pump. They hardly exist anymore. Many farmers just quit using them and left them to rot where they were. But the most incredible thing was the family saved the wooden water pipe that was connected to the bottom of the pump for drawing up the water. I’ve only ever read of them, this is the first I’ve seen.

Thank you, Mary and Mark, for saving and donating your family history, stories and equipment. It is all much appreciated.

-This past week another brother and sister called. Their mom had recently moved to a care center and the family home was to be sold.

The house, also in Westlake, was down a long dead end road. It was surrounded by trees and woods that provided a wonderful playground for growing up (so unlike the “tract” housing where so many children are raised these days).

Mom was quite a collector. Throughout the house were the many mementoes of the many trips to Asia that mom had always wished she could take. She never got there except in her dreams and by reading. Her house was awash with hundreds and hundreds of books, enough to make any library proud.

Mom was also quite a weaver. The basement was filled with looms (and of course boxes of weaving books). The family called to donate a wonderful (and huge) barn beam loom. It is the biggest one I have ever seen. It took quite a lot of work to disassemble and move. We marked all the joints with chalk, pounded out the wood pegs holding everything together, and pulled apart the mortise and tendon pieces, and carried all the heavy posts and beams across the basement and up the steps to the truck. Mom had also collected quite a pile of really old frames, heddles and miscellaneous parts. More modern heddles (usually a hundred and fifty years old or newer) are made with metal reeds. Mom had heddles made with willow sticks. –Those are really rare because of their great age and the usually long period of time when they were no longer used or cared for.

As we looked thru the house we also found and acquired a fine 120+ yr. old Ingram wall clock (to be displayed in the future museum clock shop), an old, old soap dish and a nice old wood barrel for the barrel shop. The family really didn’t think we could get everything loaded up, but years of moving buildings helped and we got it all on.

A couple days after we got everything home, we had the happy idea of putting the loom in the Girl Room. A room in the main barn is so called because it contains and displays all the things a girl of seven would have been expected to know how to use in order to be a useful person. The collection includes cook stoves, washing machines, irons, sewing machines, canning jars and equipment, portable tin bath tubs, grain grinders, mouse traps, and such. (The tubs were upended and stored, then carried in to the kitchen once a week for a bath, “whether you needed it or not”).

It took a couple days to clean and rearrange everything, and then reconstruct the loom. We also spent a good deal of time setting up the frames for holding the spools of strings used to warp the loom. It all makes a really great display and addition to the museum.

The very first building we moved to the museum was the Eastwood/Rooy Slaughter House. Continue reading →

A week or so ago a friend stopped by. She said the Huntley barn and buildings were soon to be torn down.