The Hardin County Farm Museum offers a piece of history that has long been forgotten. The museum sponsors tractor pulls, machine shows, threshing days, craft and antique shows and the traditional barn dance.
The Farm Museum focuses on the equipment, agricultural practices, life styles, and history of Hardin County farm families and agri-businesses during the period of 1850-1950. This period approximates the dates of the traditional family-operated diversified farm and predates the use of large-scale equipment, particularly of self-propelled combines. The purpose is to preserve the memories of a time past, to show the great amount of work that our ancestors did with this type of machinery.
The land on which the Museum sites was owned by members of the Robert and Barbara Brown family -- Jim and Martin (aka DRF Part). They donated a barn, corn crib, silo, two machine sheds, and two acres of ground to the Museum in April, 1996.
The focal point of the entire Farm Museum is a large, round-roofed barn, measuring 32 by 80 feet. It was built probably sometime between 1935 and 1940. Its primary use was as a dairy barn but the farm also raised hogs, chickens and feed grains and hay. A barn also provided shelter for cats and dogs.
In 1999 a chicken brooder house and a storage building were moved in. In 2000 the Goose Creek rural school house, built in 1882, was moved in and placed on a concrete foundation. On April 3, 2000, nine plus acres of adjoining ground were purchased from the Brown family, to be used for parking, sowing oats for threshing, planting corn for corn husking and beans.
The Farm Museum collections consist of about 90 pieces of the larger pieces of machinery which are located in two machine sheds and outside, and about 400 smaller antiques which are displayed on the wall of the Barn. All of these items have been identified with laminted labels, all are numbered, and all are identified on index cards and on master files.
