Living History Farms

On Wednesday night, we stayed in the parking lot of a Harvest Host, Living History Farms, in Urbandale, Iowa, just outside Des Moines. We had hoped to meet up with Carl's cousin, Jenice, but she had contracted COVID so was unable to meet up with us. 

On Wednesday evening, we were able to get some shopping done. We went to Petsmart for cat food for Miss Kitty -- she is back on a prescription diet. We had gotten one can of 3 different kinds of renal support food, and she only ate one of them at all well, so we purchased some more of that kind to try to continue her on that food. We also went to Sam's Club to get a couple of rotisserie chickens for us.

After a good night's rest at the Living History Farms parking lot, we visited the farms on Thursday morning.

We started at the Visitor Center where we purchased our entrance tickets and got a map for the exhibits.

There is a representation of the 1876 town of Walnut Hill, but we elected to go to the farms first with the plan to return to the town.

To get to the farms, we had to take a tractor cart, so we waited a little while for it to arrive.

While waiting, we saw planting beds that were marked with information...

We had never heard of Silos & Smokestacks National Heritage Area -- from what I've found online, it includes sites primarily (maybe exclusively?) in Iowa. (https://www.silosandsmokestacks.org/the-story/)

We were joined on the tractor cart with a group of 4th graders - some of the kids brought on 4 school buses that had joined us in the parking lot in the morning.

Tractor driver in enclosed cab -- so he didn't hear all the kiddos on the cart!

We took the cart from the visitor center to the farms area.

There were 3 historic farms represented -- the oldest was a 1700 Ioway farm.

The Ioway are native American people.

Kids being told about the Ioway farm.

A skin being stretched (on the left) and an example home

We walked from the Ioway Farm to the 1850 Farm...

...we somehow took no photos of the house and outbuildings at the 1850 farm!

There was a nice walk through the woods to the 1900 Horse-Powered Farm.

They provided QR codes to get more information.

In case you're interested in more information, these are the locations where the QR codes would take you:

Historic haymaking: https://www.lhf.org/bale/

Modern haymaking: https://www.lhf.org/hay/

Historic oats harvesting: https://www.lhf.org/oats/

Modern oats harvesting: https://www.lhf.org/oatstoday

Historic wheat harvesting: https://www.lhf.org/wheat

Modern wheat harvesting: https://www.lhf.org/wheattoday

This was in the yard of the farm house...

This was the name plate (Fairbanks-Morse) on the piece of equipment. It was not operating while we were there so we aren't sure what it was!

Animal barn on the farm...

... with horses inside munching down on hay.

Pig shed nearby with a momma pig and piglets. She told her piglets in no uncertain terms that they should NOT go out in the yard while those humans were there!!!

Windmill and the farm house - beautiful blue skies!

The sheep were not contained inside pens and were heading back from being out in the field grazing -- funny to be all in a line coming down the lane!

Some more of the school group was in the house when we got there, but we were able to go in after they finished... some of the items in the house...

Organ

Heating stove

Cook stove

Canned goods in the pantry

Apple press on the front porch

Some more of the kids outside at the farm house

We waited for the next tractor cart to come and rode back up to the "town" site.

We had planned to get off the cart at the back end of the town and walk through the town on our way out... but, either the cart doesn't stop there anymore, or it doesn't stop there unless requested, or it doesn't stop there when there are a bunch of 4th graders on the cart... at any rate, it didn't stop! We had used almost all of the time we had allocated before we needed to be traveling on, so we went back to Gracie, made lunch, and then got on the road heading south again.

We appreciated our quiet night's sleep and visit at the Living History Farms!