When is a pie a scythe? Avoiding data charges in 1906

By: Erin Richardson, Curator

This year, The Farmers’ Museum, in partnership with the New York State Historical Association Research Library, will be launching a new collaborative collections database. Although still in a pilot phase, you can visit the database at collections.nysha.org.  This project will allow researchers, enthusiasts, collectors and museum visitors to research objects in the Farmers’ Museum collection more thoroughly. Enough about the details of this project – more on that in a future post. What I really want to get to is a mysterious parts catalog I scanned as part of the project.

Background: Walter A Wood was a large scale manufacturer of Agricultural Equipment located in Hoosick Falls, NY – a small town between Albany and the Vermont border. Although his business began local, it was eventually an international operation. The NYSHA library has a large and comprehensive collection of catalogs, broadsides, parts lists and circulars for Wood’s company. The Farmers' Museum also has several pieces of Wood equipment in the collection.

In scanning one of the parts catalogs I discovered that each part had its own telegraph cipher. Perhaps I have been reading too many murder mystery novels, but my first thought about this cipher systems was related to German spies. I thought “Did the US government not want Germany to know where all of our grain was grown, so they directied these manufacturers to encode their ordering system?”

Here's a detail view:

(click to enlarge)

There are a number of problems with this conspiracy-theory, not the least of which are that the codes are printed in a readily available catalog and 1906 is too early to be worrying about German spies.

My next thought was “DATA PLAN”! This may seem like a non-sequitur.  However, if you have a cell phone, or have tried to upgrade your cell phone recently, you will notice that just about every phone is internet-ready and that you will have to pay for the cost of sending internet data over the cellular network to which you subscribe. It dawned on me that these telegraph cipher codes were a data cost-cutting measure for ordering your replacement parts via telegraph. Rather than sending this:

Scythe, complete, six feet

you could instruct your local telegrapher to send:

Pie. 

The cipher method reduces the cost of placing the order by 75%! 

Too bad pie is not included.

For a farmer who needed a replacement part during the middle of a harvest, ordering via telegraph could cut the delivery time down by days or weeks – and probably save a crop in the process.

Stay tuned for more on the Collections Access Initiative in future posts and some information about the Walter A Wood artifacts in the museum's collection.

Update: Bump Tavern

Since I last updated you on progress in Bump Tavern, many changes have taken place in the first floor rooms in Bump Tavern. They have slowly transformed from a dining room and bedroom/office into a sitting room and best bedroom.  Here's a pictorial update.

In the new sitting room, we've made this the long-term guests and Bump family's social hub. While overnight guests and village patrons looking for gossip and a quick beer used the tap room for those purposes, the Bump family and their summer-long vacationing guests from New York City used the sitting room for, well, sitting. However, it was also the place to catch a quick meal, a cup of tea or lemonade, darn socks, read a book, play the piano, sing, have a party or take a nap. 

Most curators can be real royal pains when it comes to moving objects for exhibition.  I try very hard not to be "that" curator. However, on this particular project, I failed miserably at planning ahead in the egress and logistics department. I decided to add a piano to the room AFTER the new, and immobile, railings were installed.  Here's an image of our wonderful collections and facilities staff gently assembling the piano in its new home after they had lifted it over the railing.

And here is preparator Stephen Loughman re-hanging some of the artwork. Notice the fully assembled piano in the background.

The adjoining room has been transformed from a bedroom/office for the tavern keeper into a best bedroom for favored or frequent guests.  New research has shown that the tavern owner most likely kept all of his cash and books in the bar area, rather than have two office locations.  And, since the Bump family lived in the tavern all year long, they may have had a more private room on the upper floors. We know from letters that by the 1860s, this room was used by guests and today it has been slightly re-furnished to represent two women travelling to the Catskills for the summer.  The dresser is part of the tavern's original furnishings was donated to us recently by ancestors.

We've refreshed the bed with a newly acquired coverlet woven by David Johnson in orleans county for Rhoda C. Dix.  Maybe Rhoda was the youngest child in a large family.  She had Johnson weave "Property of Rhoda C. Dix" into the corner block. Although not unheard of, this language is very rare. I can only envision a young woman who must constantly protect her belongings from pillaging older sisters.

Glamour shots for our venerable old lady

By: Erin Crissman, Curator

Last week, I was happy to organize professional photography for our oldest object, a 1750s Dutch plow.  Only three of these plows are known to exist in the United States. One is at the Smithsonian, one at the Daniel Parrish Whitter Agricultural Museum in Syracuse, NY and one here at The Farmers' Museum.  We don't know much about the origins of our plow, but the example at the Smithsonian is marked with a 1769 date and came from the Mohawk Valley area.

Even though we have very little information about the plow's original owner, it most certainly came from the Mohawk River valley between Albany and Amsterdam.  Since the Mohawk River has a wide floodplain, the Dutch settlers (New York State was originally a Dutch colony) probably found this land very similar to their native soil in the Netherlands - mostly silt, free of rocks and incredibly flat.  It is amazing what cultural history can tell us when there is no written documentation about the provenance of an object!

This wheeled plow was likely a great solution for the very flat land of the Netherlands. The larger wheel sat in the just-plowed furrow while the smaller wheel sat on the un-tilled land.  Plowing with this type of plow was typically accomplished in a continuous circle around the field. 

However, outside of the river valley, these Dutch natives likely found their traditional plows ill-suited for the rocky and hilly terrain of Upstate New York. The circular plowing method, used for flat land, was ineffective for hilly terrain, so the side-hill plow was developed. This type of plow has an adjustable moldboard (the curved wood piece behind the share that forces the soil to fall in a specific direction). It could be flipped from one side of the plow to another. This allowed farmers to plow across the breadth of the hill, rather than up and down in a circle pattern.

Despite the very hard labor that this plow performed during its lifetime (and it shows A LOT of wear and tear from years and years of use), today it is incredibly fragile.  It took four guys to safely move it onto the background paper for photography.  

Stay tuned for another perspective on this plow from Steve Kellogg, our blacksmith.

Above: Plow, ca.1750-1770, The Farmers' Museum Collection, F0031.1975 (Photo by Richard Walker)

Secret Life of Objects: Two-Headed Calf

By: Erin Crissman, Curator

There are some objects in The Farmers’ Museum Collection that I find very curious. As a curator, my curiosity is often not about the object itself, but about how the object came to the museum and when. As with most organizations, The Farmers’ Museum has a few periods in its history that have a specific set of characteristics. In the 1990s, TFM acquired furniture and decorative arts for new domestic spaces (More House) and re-furnishing of old spaces (Bump Tavern, Lippit House). In the 1940s and 1950s, the staff collected and re-constructed most of the buildings at the Museum. This early period is probably my favorite. The staff collected objects that weren’t very old (about 50 years or less) and even had a staff person who scoured trashcans and dumpsters for castoffs. These are still some of the Museum’s best pieces today. When I first came across the two-headed calf, I thought that it had surely been acquired in the 1940s. That was the era that brought us the Cardiff Giant, after all. I was surprised to learn that it was donated in 1979 – much later than I had originally thought. It has a wonderful story behind it as well. The calf was born in 1875 on M. John Eysaman’s farm near Little Falls, NY. It only lived for a few moments. Mr. Eysaman took the calf to a local taxidermist for preservation and had a glass case constructed to house it. His intention was to exhibit the calf, probably at local fairs. This curious animal is part of a fascination with grotesque themes in the late 19th century. It may have had both scientific and sensationalist value to Eysaman and whoever came to see it. The calf was given to TFM in 1979 by Mr. Eysaman’s great granddaughter, Anne Eysaman Schuyler. She said that the calf had "always been a conversation piece" in her home. I would think so!

Here’s a photo of the calf in the Kirby Free Library in Salisbury Center, NY, taken in April of 1979, just a few months before coming to The Farmer’s Museum’s collection.

For a few years, the two headed calf was part of the Museum of Curiosities exhibit at The Farmers’ Museum – along with the Cardiff Giant, of course!

Wild Times!: Some Assembly Required

By: Erin Crissman, Curator Its 1995, I’m graduating from high-school. I’m visited by the “ghost of career moments future” who informs me I’ll be assembling milking machines and vehicles in 15 years. At that point I would have been horrified. However, that is precisely what I did last week and it was fun! These adventures were part of installing Wild Times! our new exhibition in the Main Barn - it opens this weekend. You are invited to follow Lulu and Max around New York State on a quest to find 11 of our state’s notable animals. Two of those are the Holstein Cow and the Horse. The Farmers’ Museum has an amazing collection of agricultural objects to help us illustrate the story of these essential animals. The exhibition features a variety of milking machines that show how milking a herd of cows has changed over the last 100 years. The Page Milker is a frame on wheels with a vacuum assembly that pumps milk directly into a milk can for market. The 1923 model year came with an electric motor option. The one in our collection still has the hand-pump apparatus. Most likely, the farmer who used it hadn’t electrified his barn yet. The sulky in this exhibition is a great way to talk about horses in Central New York. Horses weren’t just for work, they were (and still are) for recreation. This sulky was probably used for rural racing and possibly even for quick one-passenger transportation. It complements the other large objects in the horse section – a one horse power tread that harnessed a horse’s power to operate threshers and a sleigh – essential for winter transportation. Hope you’ll come to check out my equipment assembly skills – and join Lulu and Max on their quest across the state.

Giant About Town

By: Kate Betz, Manager of Public Programs

If there was ever an object that deserved to be in a story that was titled “The Many Adventures of…,” the Cardiff Giant is such an object. I recently read an excellent blog post on the early history of the Giant, including his “discovery” and exhibition in the nineteenth century. I thought that our readers might be interested to know that his adventures upon arrival at The Farmers’ Museum in 1948 did not cease, but continued with a vengeance. On May 15, 1948, the Giant arrived at The Farmers’ Museum where he was “laid to rest,” as it were, by a group of workers. The exhibit was opened to the public four days later and crowds began to arrive to once again gawk at the “stupendous stone statue.” All was not wine and roses for the Giant, however. Less than a year after his arrival, the Giant was at the center of new drama when a man by the name of Michael Fitzmaurice sued the museum, stating that his grandfather had created the Cardiff Giant and had loaned him to P.T. Barnum. (Those of you who have been to the museum and seen our most recent display will know that this was, of course, a false claim—P.T. Barnum never owned THE Cardiff Giant, but had created a fake of a fake that he exhibited at the same time that the Giant enjoyed its greatest success). Three years after his arrival, the Giant was done with life in a pit. He determined that life above ground had many more benefits. In 1951, he was moved to an above ground display where he remained for the next fourteen years until, in 1965, he moved to even fancier digs in a covered enclosure at the end of our Main Barn. Again ready for a change of scenery, the Giant moved in 1984 to a new exhibit in what is now the Louis C. Jones Center called the “Museum of Wonders.” There, he joined the ranks of some of the most eclectic items from the collections of museums across New York State including a two-headed calf, dinosaur tracks, and relics of the American Revolution. This exhibit was meant to show museum visitors what the very earliest museums—such as the American Museum created by Mr. P.T. Barnum (yes, he actually did create this one)—looked like. Called cabinets of curiosities, they were treasure troves of oddities, wonders, and other strange objects meant to delight and intrigue the public. Though he enjoyed the company, the Giant eventually tired of sharing the spotlight with the other objects and again sought a relocation—this time to nearly the same spot that he had occupied on his arrival in 1948. He was exhibited in a tent that was meant to recreate the manner in which nineteenth-century spectators would have come upon him. In 2003, Giant and tent were moved to become a part of the museum’s new Country Fair exhibit. While he was somewhat embarrassed by the birthday hat he was forced to wear, the Giant nonetheless appreciated the attention during the celebration of his 134th birthday. Even the most stoic of giants eventually becomes antsy and yearns to roam free. After 58 years of living within the museum’s walls, the Cardiff Giant was allowed off the grounds for a special treat—a central part of the Hall of Fame Game parade held each year in Cooperstown. Harkening back to his earliest years of display, the Giant reveled in the sizeable crowd that came out to see him. He thrilled at the cheers, enjoyed the wind on his skin, but still managed to maintain his modesty. Since his time in the sun, the Giant has recently retired to a quieter location at the entrance to our Main Barn. Make sure to pay him a visit when we open the doors for his 61st season at the museum on April 1st.

New Acquisitions - Deen Loom

By: Erin Crissman, Curator

Last week, John Hart (assistant curator of collections) and I travelled to Worcester, NY, to collect a unique loom from a donor. Unlike most of the looms in our collection, this one was made in the 20th century and is cast iron. This Deen Advance Fly Shuttle Loom, made in Harlan, Iowa, amazingly survived two or three changes of property ownership and remained set up exactly as it was left in the 1940s or 50s – in a barn, warped and ready to produce carpet. The extra-special feature of this loom is the custom warping system invented by the weaver. This modification allowed him (or her) to continually weave a very long length of carpet, rather than warping the loom with a finite length of warping cord (in this case a very sturdy cotton twine). So, instead of cutting a 10 foot length and warping the loom, the warp was continually pulled from the spools mounted on the ceiling. Where did he or she learn to make such a productive change? Did this weaver work in a textile factory? He or she was probably operating the loom in the 1930s. During the Great Depression, home production of carpet was encouraged by the US Government as an extra income source for rural families. We hope to learn much more about this loom in the coming months.

Sampling History at the More House

By: Kajsa Sabatke, Interpretive Projects Coordinator Mary More was the youngest child of Jonas and Deborah More; she grew up in the house that once stood in Roxbury, New York, and is now part of the museum. According to her family, Mary – nicknamed Polly in her youth – had a personality that combined the “jovial, fun-loving and happy disposition of her father, and the deep, earnest piety of her mother.” When Mary was 13 years old, she completed a sampler that showcased her needlework skills. Her sampler is one of the few family items in the museum’s collection. In order to better preserve the sampler, we store it in a climate-controlled storage area instead of the More House. I will study the sampler and create a pattern of it over the winter. We will use the pattern to make our own reproduction sampler for the More House, so visitors can see it in the same house where Mary first made her sampler 180 years ago. Along the way, I hope to learn more about samplers and try my own hand at the kind of needlework that Mary had already mastered by age 13. Stay tuned for more updates on this project! Sampler, 1829. By Mary More, The Farmers' Museum Collection, Gift of Jean More Porter. F0005.2000

Political Coverage in 1845

By: Kajsa Sabatke, Interpretive Projects Coordinator With inaugural excitement in full swing, I decided to learn more about the inauguration of James K. Polk on March 4, a rainy day in 1845. In his speech, Polk addressed the national debt, lowering tariff rates, and his goals for westward expansion. You can find his inaugural speech here.

an engraving of Polk's Inauguration

Polk was the first president whose inauguration was reported by telegraph. Today, with live television coverage and internet streaming, it’s hard to imagine a time when the news was reported only through written accounts. Samuel F.B. Morse used the first telegraph line in the country, from Washington to Baltimore, to provide almost immediate political coverage. During the 1844 presidential election, which Polk narrowly won, he transmitted the official results between the two cities (results from the northern states came into Baltimore and the southern results into Washington). These transmissions helped to prove the practical advantages of the technology.

Did you know that in addition to patenting the telegraph, Samuel Morse was also an artist? In fact, the Fenimore Art Museum , owns a portrait Morse painted of Justice Samuel Nelson, who began his career as a Supreme Court justice just before Polk took office. Nelson lived in Cooperstown and owned the land that is now occupied by the museum, and his law office is part of the historic village.

Samuel Nelson by Samuel F.B.Morse. Gift of Stephen C. Clark N0339.1955

The Brooklyn Museum recently blogged about Samuel FB Morse as an artist. You can read more about him here.

Take off your boots!

By: Erin Crissman, Curator I can remember my mother saying that several times each day during the winter. I would begrudgingly sit on the floor and tug my boots off, probably flinging muddy snow around the room. Certainly children and adults in the 19th century heard that order as well. (At the left are a pair of child's boots in our collection from about 1860.) However, they had an ingenious tool to help them get out of their boots that I don't see very often today - a bootjack.

This device came in a variety of forms, but the essential function was always the same - a tool to help you remove your shoes without sitting and tugging. The boot-wearer could step on one side of the bootjack, then put his boot heel into the carved-out wedge on the other side and pull his foot out of the boot. No sitting, no tugging and no muddy snow spray. (At the right is a homemade bootjack in our collection from the 1800s.)

Bootjack: F0031.1950

Boots: F0042.1959ab