Creating The Farmers' Museum: Get Moving!

By: Erin Crissman, Curator

American outdoor living history museums, like The Farmers’ Museum, are 20th century creations. Skansen in Sweden is the world’s oldest, started in 1891. Some open-air museums, like Williamsburg (1927), are entire restored towns. Others, like The Farmers’ Museum (1942) are village settings created by moving relatively local historic buildings to a central location. Some, like The Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village (1929), have buildings and artifacts from across the country! When beginning to re-create a historic village in the 1940s, the Museum’s founding director, Louis C. Jones, didn’t have very far to go. Across the street, the New York State Historical Association and Fenimore House (today the Fenimore Art Museum) had a growing collection of primary source material – paintings, drawings, lithographs that illustrated what New York’s villages had looked like in 100 years ago. You can see one of the project’s most influential works here. Jones and early museum staff set out to collect all of the buildings important to a New York village. The first buildings were Todd’s Store, Filers Corners Schoolhouse, and Bump Tavern. Below are photographs of some of the museum's buildings in transition.

Louis C. Jones oversees moving Dr. Jackson's Office from Westford, NY

Re-constructing Fields' Blacksmith Shop -1950s

A crane positions the rear wing of the Westcott Shop -1997

Moving Cornwallville Church for the second time. It was originally placed behind Lippitt farmhouse, in the background of this photo. - 1990s

Christmas Greenery

By: Gwen Miner, Domestic Arts Supervisor From ancient times, plants and trees that remained green all year had special meaning for people in winter. Since then people in many cultures have hung evergreen boughs over their windows and doors.

At The Farmers' Museum we have based our use of greenery for Christmas decoration in Central New York on accounts written in 19th century journals and diaries. One of the earliest accounts of the use of greenery that I have found is from the diary of Sarah Amelia Fairman of Butternuts, NY –1819-1821. On December 25, Sarah wrote, “Christmas has commenced in the eve we assembled to the courts of the Lord-the edifice was dressed with sprigs of green laurel and the running vine…” Sarah’s diary can be found in the Special Collections of the New York State Historical Association /The Farmers’ Museum Research Library. library.nysha.org

Susan Fenimore Cooper in her book “Rural Hours”, first published in 1850, wrote on December, Tuesday, 19th—

"We passed a cart standing in the woods, well loaded with Christmas Greens, for our parish church. Pine and hemlock are the branches commonly used among us for the purpose; the hemlock, with its flexible twigs, and the grayish reverse of the foliage, produces a very pretty effect...Neither the holly, the cedar, the arbor vitae, the cypress, or the laurel, grows in our immediate neighborhood, so that we are limited to the pine and hemlock. These two trees, however, when their branches are interwoven are very well adapted for Christmas wreaths."