The Farmers' Museum

One morning while in Cooperstown, we had the opportunity to go to the Farmers' Museum. Scott and I had been once before, a very long time ago, and I was excited to get to take the boys to see this neat place.

It is basically a series of buildings, farmhouses, shops, fields, and activities that depict life in the 1840's. The people who work there are dressed in that era's clothing and all do their jobs in a way that people of that time would work. It is really fascinating to see how creative people were but also interesting to see how much harder they had to work than we do now.

Our first stop was the Baby Animal Barn because we got there right about feeding time.

We then went on to see some scenes from normal life, stopping by the blacksmith's shop (making nails)

and visiting the printing press. This was a really neat stop because the lady explained that each case of letters was organized in exactly the same way so that no matter what font you were using, the letters were always pulled in the same way. The case on the top held capital letters and the bottom case held lower case letters and that's why we call them "upper" case and "lower" case letter. Cool!!

Next stop was the apothecary and we watched as the man made pills from ginger. It was very interesting to see the tools that were used to make medicine before machines came along.

Here are the kids enjoying chasing some chickens around the grounds. We found out later that the chickens really don't like being chased!! Oops!!

Later in the afternoon, we had the opportunity to meet Daisy Mae.

This would prove to be an experience like no other!! Little did we know that there are not many cows left on the planet who are hand milked. Did you know that cows don't like to go back and forth between being hand-milked and machine-milked?? Well, they don't!!

Here are all the kids waiting for their once-in-a-lifetime experience!! (That's how Farmer Wayne described it!!)

And here's Luke giving the milking a try --

Here's Parker --

Alex --

Even Landry did this - Amazing!!

Scott seemed to enjoy it!!

Me?? Not so much!! Two words that kinda freaked me out a bit -- HAIRY UDDERS!! Just something not right about that!! But I did it and lived to tell about it!!

All in all, this was an awesome experience...fun and very educational too!!

One last pictures shows Ella (3) having a great time with the goats. They obviously loved her!!