COLLECTIONS

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..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..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..

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 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 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.

A few years ago the museum acquired another tractor for its collection, a 1940 9N Ford. It took quite awhile in the gettin’.

                                                                 A couple generations ago a family had a farm on several hundred acres along Hawkins Rd. in Richfield Twp. It had a nice old farm house, big well maintained fields, and very large barn that had exceptionally wide roof boards. Near the house the family built a really nice outdoor, stone fireplace which was featured in a long ago Cleveland newspaper article and was apparently somewhat famous for quite a while. The barn lasted until about 15 years ago when it was torn down, in part because of the depredations of a pack of ground hogs who undermined its foundation. But, at least, those large roof boards were saved and sold to panel a restaurant in Cleveland. The fireplace still stands, but is suffering a great deal from the weather of the past 60 some years. And of course the farm had several tractors, tillers and other equipment.

                                                                                 The family eventually sold the land in three pieces. The house and barn and about 30 acres went to a couple of guys (both named John) who raised and raced sulky horses. (For many years I made hay for them on about 20 of their acres, and stored it in their barn for the horses. During those years I also acquired several of the original farm’s nearly eight hundred pound tillers. Those things were brutes. It’s hard to imagine them easier to use than horses, but they must have been.) Another 30 or so acres went to a guy living in Hinckley, who let me make hay every year for feeding my Hereford cattle, and it helped him by keeping the land mowed. The remainder of the land was sold to a couple of city folks who put up a small building, an outhouse and a picnic table or two near the pond, and used the area as a place to get out of town on weekends. When they bought the land, they acquired one of the farm’s tractors to keep the fields mowed. But they didn’t seem to be much at maintenance and they ended up parking the no longer running tractor in a small shed. There it sat for the next 40+ years.

                                                                                                                                                         About 38 years ago they hired me to mow the fields. I continued to do so for a number of years, until they got divorced and neither one of them would agree to pay me for the most recent hours of mowing I had done for them. Over the years I have occasionally wondered about the tractor, so now and again I checked on it. It began to sink a bit into the dirt from just the action of freezing and thawing. And the shed began to fall. It was a shame to see a once nice tractor go to rust (as I have seen so many tractors and various other equipment rot in fields, left behind on once productive, now abandoned, farms.). Every so often I would contact the old lady about paying me the due on the work I had done, and I also asked her about selling me the tractor. But she was an plain ornery person (as so said everyone I ever talked to about her, –including her family) and she wouldn’t talk about settling or selling.


                                                                                                                                                             When finally the old lady sold the land I went to talk to the new owner. He said sure I could have the tractor just for the hauling it away. There was just one problem. The lady had specified in the land contract that she would maintain ownership of that darn tractor, and she could come get it whenever she wanted. Of course by then she was in her nineties and hadn’t been out of her house in years (according to her family who lived in the other half of the family duplex). She was just by gosh going to hold on to that tractor until the bitter end. But, fortunately, the new owner wanted it gone, so we decided I could store the old rusty Ford until she came and got it. And it’s been here now for some time.
So, at last she is gone, having left a bit of havoc in her wake. The tractor is now “free”, and we have asked our good friend Ward Cox, and his apprentice James, to restore it to running. We’ve so far spent far too much money on parts and labor to fix it, we could have bought a similar tractor in good condition for less. But sometimes it’s just the doing of something that matters, not the practicality. We’ll use it to make some hay for the animals and do some work around the museum. And it will recall the stories of the folks that first owned it, and it will remind of the lady who just wouldn’t let it go.


                                                                                                                                                               Four or five years ago, before I had the tractor, the grandson of the original owners stopped by. We got to talking and he mentioned how much he had liked that tractor when he was a kid visiting his grandparents on their farm. We took a walk and he was quite sad to see it in its depleted condition in that falling shed. I hope he stops by again sometime, and sees how great that old Ford looks now. I ‘spect he’ll even take it out for another spin like he did so many years ago.


                                                                                                                                                     –Historical Note: The 9N tractors were mainly sold before WW2. They were/are about a twenty horse utility tractor widely used on farms of the era. With the start of the war, Roosevelt imposed price freezes on many of the goods sold those days, mostly to prevent price gouging and inflation from war caused shortages. Ford couldn’t afford to sell the 9N’s for the prewar price, so they came out with a “new” tractor, the 2N. The 2 and 9N’s were virtually the same tractor, with the only difference being that Ford removed the battery and starter from the 9, and installed a magneto and starting crank to make it a 2N. The 2N was thus considered a “new” model tractor so the price could be raised (even though it was a bit harder to use).