Greenfield Village Open-Air Museum

The Firestone Farm is a real working farm, and the presenters can be found working the land seasonally, just as it was done in the 19th century: tilling, harrowing, planting, and doing all of the other chores typical of the era. It is a living history re-creation of life on a farm of the 1880's in Eastern (Columbiana) Ohio, and the presenters who work the farm have done a marvelous job in their presentation of this life. At the end of this posting, click the link to see how hog butchering was done in the 1880's. Numerous livestock call the farm home, including draft horses, cattle, pigs, chickens, and the aforementioned sheep. Some roam about the barnyard freely, while the larger animals are fenced in. But, one can get close to them as they walk into the barn out back. Beware, however: the odors of a country farm are prominent! The barn is known as a Pennsylvania-German bank barn, one of the most common barns built before 1880. They are known as bank barns because one side of t...

(This particular chapter is mainly about the house the Firestones lived in. The barn and other outbuildings are in the next chapter (scroll to the bottom for the link). I must also 'warn' the reader that there are quite a few pictures of the Firestone Farm in this chapter of the blog. I hope you enjoy them!) The Firestone Farm was originally built by Peter Firestone in 1828 in Columbiana, Ohio (just a few miles from the Pennsylvania border), and is now a gem among gems inside Greenfield Village. Among the family members living there in the latter half of the 19th century was young Harvey Firestone, the grandson of Peter, who would later gain fame and fortune in the tire industry and became a close friend of Henry Ford. Original photo taken in the early 1880's During the 19th and into the 20th century, the Firestones raised a large flock of sheep, with wool being their 'cash crop,' but they also harvested oats, hay, corn, and wheat. In 1965, nearly thirty year...

A significant addition to the Greenfield Village railroad system, this 1901 Armstrong turntable from Petoskey, Michigan allows locomotives and railroad cars to be turned around to run in the opposite direction. It was built by the Detroit Bridge and Iron Works, but is balanced so well that one person using muscle-power alone can turn a load weighing up to 140 tons. .

From its inception through the 1940's, Greenfield Village consistently expanded itself in size and scope with the continual addition of historic structures. But, once Doctor Howard's office was placed there, a span of over 20 years went by before another old house found its way into the open-air museum (not including the Herschell-Spillman Carousel). It was in 1977 that antiquarian, Mary Dana Wells donated a saltbox house, complete with most of the colonial furnishings she collected, as well as an endowment fund to maintain it, to the Edison Institute to be placed in Greenfield Village. The old home was originally brought to Mrs. Wells attention by way of a Mr. George Watson, an employee/architect of Old Sturbridge Village , located in Massachusetts. That open-air museum could not use a 1750 saltbox due to it not being appropriate to their 1790 to 1840 span of collections. Mrs. Wells had much of the '19th century updates' removed in her own restoration project and fo...