The Plot Thickens

Yesterday I took my first-ever visit to The Farmers Museum in Cooperstown, NY.  I’ve been curious about it since finding old Kodak slides of a trip my grandparents and father took there in the 1960s, when my dad was about 14.

This place didn’t disappoint. It’s a shrine to the early American agriculture industry, focusing on tools and machinery from the 1700s-1800s, including a pretty decent array of stage coaches, horse-drawn carriages, and sleighs. 

I’m not a mechanical person and I don’t have a single engineer’s bone in my body. (Or do I?  My dad was an auto mechanic.)  But I was enthralled by most of the exhibit, especially the mechanical genius involved in building some of these stage coaches and carriages, which have shock absorbers under the seats and brake mechanisms in front of the wheels.  (The one thing they often lack:  a clear path for climbing five feet up to the driving position.)

In the back of the main exhibit barn, a series of authentic outbuildings from the Central NY region are gathered on display in a “farming village.”  Every building serves a historically accurate purpose:  the print shop, the general store, the doctor’s office, the lawyer’s office, the church, the tavern, and so on.  The employees or volunteers within are dressed in period garb and are willing to converse with you in character if you want. (I don’t; it creeps me out thoroughly to hear, “Welcome to our tavern!,” or “This here is our fancy loom.”)

The farm within the village is a real farm, albeit tiny.  The Museum has some horses, cows, sheep and goats, and grows an impressive patch of hops — one of the chief crops in Otsego County during the 1800s. (No wonder I like this area so much… I made my first batch of home brew last year… from a Mr. Beer kit.)

I was surprised how much about this place seemed familiar to me. If you grow up in New England, particularly one of its first-settled villages (est. 1634), you are bound to see a lot of items that haven’t much changed in the last 300 years. Many are still in use, in the 300 year-old homes that fill my childhood neighborhood.  Still others are on display as antiques. My mom’s parents own an iron made from cast iron; a butter churn; old scythes, saws and tractor seats; a small, cast-iron cannon toy; and an 1860s convertible high-chair/rocker.  My dad’s parents put him in a wooden rocking cradle as a baby.

Much of what I was seeing triggered nostalgia; the rest got me thinking, I mean really *thinking*, about what it was like to live and farm in the Northeast in the 1700s and 1800s.  This exhibit farm is seriously realistic; in one building, women were unwrapping a wheel of cheese they’d recently made. Flies were landing on it; swarming everywhere; and crowding into my eyes.  Do I want some fresh-made cheese?  No, thank you.  I want to leave.  As in, run from the room.  (Which I did.)

My experiences with the livestock were similar.  At one point, I took a shortcut through a horse stable, and it was a real, serious horse stable, with manure pressed into the wood planks and stink all around.  The baby animals were cute, but they had flies around them, too.  There’s no helping it; flies are drawn to shit, and on a real, working farm, shit is everywhere.

That’s not a very eloquent message, I guess, but it’s the one I took away from yesterday’s visit.  That, plus a renewed sense of wonder at how far we’ve come, technologically, and how hard we’re working right now to reverse things just a little bit, to the point where agriculture is still efficient, but not as corporate or as wasteful.

If you’re ever in Cooperstown, I highly recommend a visit:  The Farmers Museum.