Even
though we were just taking a quick 3 day tour of south central Nebraska, I
decided that we should spend a bit of time in at least one of the larger
museums recommended in our guidebook, “Off the Beaten Path – Nebraska” by Diana
Lambdin Meyer.
Note: As evident per the green grass, our trip was in early September…
I chose
the Nebraska Prairie Museum in Holdrege Nebraska. To quote, this museum “is housed in a new,
two-story building, with well-designed exhibits that cover every facet of the
country’s development. You can’t turn
around without seeing something interesting.”
The
author was right! This museum is packed
with Americana and the grounds include the church to the left of this photo, a
one-room school house, an early farmhouse, a windmill, a watchtower and yes,
one of those ubiquitous cabooses that are found just about everywhere across
the country. (Much more about the watchtower in another posting)
There
were dozens of vignettes showing how life was back whenever… This bedroom is
from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. All of these scenes were carefully thought
out and the detail in some cases is pretty impressive. I’ve lived in a house where we had a 2-hole
brick outhouse…but I’ve never had to use a chamber pot, have you?
Other
than the spooky looking little child in highchair, we really liked this old
turn of the century kitchen scene. Those
old stoves are really works of art…and a top quality refurbished antique stove
can be very expensive. Note the old rug beater on the wall to the left of the
clock…
My
family never cooked on a wood stove but we did have a pump in our old farmhouse
kitchen! The water was always nice and
cold. One downside to our country home
was the fact that a farmer raised pigs in the field about 60 feet from the
kitchen… If the wind was right, we could enjoy a ‘special fragrance’ with
dinner on a hot summer day.
No
dummies in this early office layout… How many people under the age of 30 have
even seen a typewriter! No computers or
electronics anywhere…
This
early barbershop even came with some ugly linoleum… Since I married a former
hairdresser, I haven’t personally seen the inside of a barbershop for over 30
years. I have seen some stories on TV
about country barbershops here in East Tennessee that didn’t look much
different than this one.
How
many people under the age of 50 have ever even taken a train? I think that that’s a ‘mail hook’ standing
against the wall. Trains would snatch
mailbags or ‘catcher pouches’ hanging from these hooks as they sped by…
Then
there were the old time general stores…with mechanical cash registers. No credit cards! However, you might have had an running
account at the store which would have been maintained by the store owner in a
ledger.
I don’t
remember general stores when I was young, but I do remember that we had a
couple of local grocery stores that carried meat, milk and basic groceries. As late as the 7th grade, (in the
early 50s), we had a local grocer only about 2 blocks from my house.
This
scene was meaningful to Laurie… As a former hairdresser, she could relate to
many of these early beauty salon items, despite the fact that they pre-dated
her time in the business. The early
electric curler set on the rack to the left remind me of something you might
find on death row!
This is
the early farmhouse adjacent to the main display building. Like everything else here at the Prairie
Museum, the home is well maintained both inside and outside. This home is typical for its time…
In the 4th grade, I lived in an old farmhouse in southern Michigan. We had electricity along with that 2-hole
outhouse I mentioned earlier. Our house
was all brick and it was huge…almost impossible to heat. It was so big that we only used the
downstairs. We did love the enormous
wrap-around porch that covered 2 sides of the home.
This is
an interior photo of the living room or ‘parlor’ in the farmhouse. I wonder how common it would have been for a
farmhouse parlor to include an organ among its furnishings…
I went
on-line to check out antique parlor organs.
It appears that most of these types of organs were made between the
early 1890s and about 1905. Refurbished
and restored, they sell today for between $6,500 and $18,000.
And how
about this early stove! We’d never seen
one like this before. It’s a Perfection
Oil Stove with Blue Metal Trim that was made by Svea Erickson. Note that the ‘oven’ sits on top of a couple
of oil burners. I did find a couple of
similar Perfection Oil Stoves for sale on eBay for between $400 and $500, but
they weren’t in as nice a condition as this one.
This is
the interior of the church that was visible to the left of the main exhibit
building in the first photo. The Swedish
Immanuel Lutheran Church was built in the early 1880s and it was relocated to
this site in 1988.
In this
view, you can see the watchtower, the one room school, the farmhouse and the
windmill. It was a beautiful day as you can see!
This is
the classroom in the "Snowball" school. Like many
of the other vignettes, appropriately dressed store manikins were used to add a
‘lifelike’ feel to the scenario. You
will note that the desks have cups and napkins on them. We were lucky to be able to go inside the
school because a bunch of kids were at the museum ‘experiencing’ what school
used to be like. I don't know why it was named the Snowball school.
And
look here! Kids playing on an old time
piece of playground equipment. They were
having a great time…with no electronics or fancy play things. These rudimentary ‘merry-go-rounds’ would
probably be banned from modern playgrounds as being too dangerous!
In the
next postings about our visit to this museum, we will feature photos of many of
the old day-to-day items on display, farm equipment as well as trucks and
autos…and I’ll explain that watchtower and its history.
The
Prairie Museum of Nebraska is located at the north edge of Holdrege Nebraska on
North US Highway 183. Phone:
308-995-5015. Website: http://www.nebraskaprairie.org/.
Just click on any of the photos to enlarge
them…
Thanks
for stopping by for a visit!
Take
Care, Big Daddy Dave
