Museum of Western Reserve Farms & Equipment

A long time family acquaintance and friend, Chuck, stopped by a few weeks ago. He brought a fantastic 2/3 sized barn beam loom. My best guess it dates to at least the War of Northern Aggression, and probably much earlier. (That would be the War Between the States, or Civil War, for any of you Federalists reading this.) Continue reading →

The museum sells pumpkins, corn stalks, folk art & crafts, mums, cider and more to raise money for projects. Once a week, we drive over to River Styx Cider Mill to pick up cider.

Yesterday I decided to try a different route, and got a bit lost. Continue reading →

Every so often I run into some project that just seems to take forever to get done. The Hamburg Horse Shoeing & Jobbing building is a very good example. Continue reading →

When I was young, I remember folks in Richfield still arguing about the War of Rebellion/War Between the States. Continue reading →

In 2009, the owner of Halter Feed & Grain retired. After 50 yrs. of operation by the family, the Mill, located in Robertsville, Stark Co., was sold at action. The museum was able to save two feed baggers, conveyer belts and pulleys, the Halter Feed sign and a very nice printed Halter feed sack. We have now set up the Halter Mill display at the museum.

Over the years we have also collected many other feed mill items and equipment, including the Garman Farm hammer mill, several platform scales for weighing bags of grain, a quite rare oat crusher used for crimping oats to make a better more digestible horse feed,  a seed sorter, grain grinding mill, a number of table top corn grinders, hand trucks, feed and supplements signs, a neat price list sign board from Ashery Feed Mill, lots of feed bags and more. Next to the mill will be parked the Museum’s 1919 Model TT feed delivery truck.

This collection makes a new and interesting display to come see the next time you visit the museum.

“If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: that was the American dream.”    ~Edward Abbey

“A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia. ”    ~David McCullough

“Our food crisis began when we stopped caring about where our food came from. It began when we no longer knew the people that grew our produce and raised the animals we eat. It began when we stopped cooking and started eating out of boxes and ate fast-food in our cars. It began when we started trusting companies that rely solely on profit to feed us. Monsanto exists because of our neglect. How we became so disconnected from such an important part of our very being is hard to understand.  –It’s Time to Reconnect! Support Local Agriculture!”    ~Anonymous

“If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.”    ~Pearl Buck

“To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.”    ~Mahatma Gandhi

“The challenge of history is to recover the past and introduce it to the present.”    ~David Thelen

“The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.”    ~Abraham Lincoln

“History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same.”    ~Walter Rauschenbusch

“It is hard for us today to realize how very widely communities were separated from one another when they depended for transportation wholly on the railroad and the horse and wagon – and when telephones were still scarce, and radios non-existent. A town which was not situated on a railroad was really remote. A farmer who lived five miles outside the county seat made something of an event of hitching up and taking the family to town for a Saturday afternoon’s shopping. (His grandchildren make the run in a casual ten minutes, and think nothing of it.) A trip to see friends ten miles away was likely to be an all-day expedition, for the horse had to be given a chance to rest and be fed. No wonder that each region, each town, each farm was far more dependent upon its own resources – its own produce, social contacts, amusements – than in later years. For in terms of travel and communication the United States was a very big country indeed.

No wonder, furthermore, that the majority of Americans were less likely than their descendants to be dogged by that frightening sense of insecurity which comes from being jostled by forces – economic, political, international – beyond one’s personal ken. Their horizons were close to them. They lived among familiar people and familiar things – individuals and families and fellow townsmen much of their own sort, with ideas intelligible to them. A man’s success or failure seemed more likely than in later years to depend upon forces and events within his own range of vision. Less often than his sons and grandsons did he feel that his fortune, indeed his life, might hang upon some decision made in Washington or Berlin or Moscow, for reasons utterly strange to his experience. The world at which he looked over the dashboard of the family carriage might not be friendly, but at least most of it looked understandable.”  ~The Big Change: 1900-1950 by Frederick Lewis Allen, published in 1952.

–Come to the museum. Learn about America’s agrarian past. And learn how to use those past skills and knowledge, to raise your own animals, grow your own food, make your own everyday tools, goods and clothing. Stop by anytime to talk, or take one of the museum’s many homesteading & self-reliance classes.

In the last several months the museum’s tool collection has continued to grow. The biggest additions are a hand cranked sheet metal bender, a foot powered lathe, a “bicycle” grinding wheel, a hand made blacksmith forge, a foot powered jig saw and several wood stoves.

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Starting Thanksgiving day, bring the family out to Stone Garden Farm and Village to take a free tour of the many buildings that make up our 19th century village and to pick out the perfect Christmas tree. Continue reading →

The museum is now offering a fun day on the farm, learning lots of “old time” skills and crafts. For the perfect and very different birthday party, bring your child and friends to learn to make a candle, pull taffy, churn home made ice cream or butter, collect eggs in the chicken coop, milk the cow and make cheese and butter, play old time games or lots of other American heritage/Laura Ingalls Wilder activities.  Call or email for pricing and scheduling  (330)659-3507  StoneGardenFamily@yahoo.com

The Museum has a growing collection of buggies and wagons. 110+ years ago horses, harness and wooden wheels formed the backbone of American transportation. Folks also occasionally used bicycles, but the few bikes were little used beyond the paved streets of the cities. Dirt roads were just too rutted and rough. Continue reading →

Hunting season having just concluded, several friends (most especially Glen) gave us a quite a bit of deer fat. We use the tallow produced from it in our daily cooking and when teaching classes in soap and candle making. Continue reading →

This past summer we built a “new” greenhouse on to the side of the Rev. Searle’s farm barn. It is modeled somewhat on the greenhouse at Zoar Village, which was established in 1817 by German Separatists. Continue reading →

Here is a small peek into the wonderful work done by our favorite photographer, Arlan Heiser, as he catalogued the collections, buildings, scenes and work around the museum.

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