You Can Live Like a Pioneer & Local Bloggers Write About The Museum

Our Laura Ingalls Wilder Days event was a big a hit. We had families enjoying pioneer life all over the village this past weekend!

Did you know that you can come and live like pioneers at the museum for an entire weekend? You'll live in the Pioneer Homestead, (this includes sleeping!) make your meals over an open hearth, tend to the animals, haul your own water, pick your own vegetables and experience life like a 19th century pioneer, complete with period costume. If you've seen the PBS show, Frontier House, you'll be doing something similar (hopefully without all of the drama!)

Check out this blog post by a family who took part in our Pioneer House Program!

For more information on the Pioneer House you can click here. For an application, you can click here.

Local Folks Enjoying The Museum!

For more blog posts featuring the museum, check out the links below!

Scott Pitoniak talks about our Vintage Baseball League-Note, even though he references the tournament this past weekend, we have ball games going in through the end of the season!

A local family talks about their recent visit to the museum!

Another local blogger whose daughter volunteers at the museum wrote posts about our Civil War Reenactment & Meeting Dean Butler!

Who Is Cutting The Grass In The 19th Century?

Pioneer Farmstead

As it turns out, hardly anyone.

Recently we were sent a comment regarding the upkeep around some of the village properties that we thought deserved a detailed explanation regarding our vision for the grounds of the museum.

This year, in order to provide a more accurate and educational representation of 19th century life, we have altered the way in which the grounds are taken care of around many of the village buildings.

The pioneer farmstead has the least manicured lawn, in fact, it is interpreted to have a yard rather than a lawn as a pioneer would not typically have "planted" anything like lawn and would not have had the time or the inclination to cut, weed and water it.

Field For Haying

The space between the Pioneer Farmstead and Kieffer's Place has been left uncut deliberately as we will be haying this for our animals, as would have been done in the 19th century.

The Jones Farm has a more of a lawn would have been part of a more established farm. Even though the grass has been cut more than at the Pioneer Farmstead, you might see growth around fences as a 19th century farmer would still have been very busy and not likely to do yardwork as we do today.

Jones Farm Fence Post

Contrast this with the manicured lawns & gardens of The Hyde House, The Hamilton House and The Livingston-Backus House and you can see the difference in styles of gardens at the time as well as the difference that money and leisure time have on upkeep of grounds and gardens.

Formal Garden At Livingston-Backus

We hope that this change in direction is one that provides yet another layer of understanding of 19th century life for our visitors.

Opening The Root Cellar at The Pioneer Farmstead

Before Opening

Want to see what we found in the root cellar?

On opening day at the museum we opened the root cellar at the Pioneer Farmstead after a long cold winter. We were excited and anxious to see how our vegetables had fared. This is our 5th year with a root cellar and each year our results have gotten better. The first year there was absolutely nothing at all in the cellar when we opened it. And no trace of anything either!

We've improved our technique over the years by adding wood walls and a french drain of stones in the bottom.

This year we had an impressive array of beets, turnips and parsnips but lost the carrots. In another cellar we had cabbages and onions. Those are separated from the other vegetables as they give off a gas that will break down the other vegetables quickly.

Each cellar would have provided vegetables for a family for about a month and a typical family would have 4 or 5 of such cellars around their property. The best ones would have been built into the side of a hill if possible.

Even in the 85 degree weather that we had last week, when we peeked into the cellar it was still markedly cooler than the air above it.

In the cellar

One thing to note that while the vegetables have stayed quite well over the winter, they need to be used immediately after being taken from the cellar or they begin to get soft very quickly.

Waiting to be used in the Pioneer Farmstead