Preserving the Past at Penope Farm
Third generation dairyman celebrates evolution of agricultural technology
By Oscar H. Will III
In my lifetime I have experienced the replacement of almost every technology that I used when I started farming,” writes Richard (Dick) McGuire in his personal memoirs. “I saw it coming in the 1970s and began collecting the tools of yesterday’s agriculture before they were lost forever.” In the early 1980s, Dick started converting some of the farm’s original buildings into display spaces to house nine theme-based museum rooms linking the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century.
The museums at Penope Farm sit atop Scotch Hill north of Cambridge, N.Y., a few miles from the Vermont border and with a spectacular eastern view of the Battenkill River Valley. The farm is named for that spectacular view. “When I was in college, Dad wrote to say that we needed a unique name for the farm to make it easier to register our Holsteins,” Dick recalls. “My roommate had borrowed an Algonquin-English dictionary from the Colgate University library and we found ‘Penope,’ which means East View.”
Dick and his wife, Polly, live in the house where he was born, and where his father was born before him. The center section of the house, and the original section of the barn, date to about 1830. In time, the three generations of McGuires who worked that ground added additional farms to the acreage, and many of the old tools and household pieces found on the associated building sites are now in Dick’s collection. “The farm itself is literally the foundation of the museum collections,” Dick explains. “But some pieces have come from neighbors, friends and even auctions.” The fact that those artifacts weren’t bulldozed under or sent to the scrap yard reflects Dick’s strong appreciation of history. “If I could have chosen a time to live so as to observe the greatest evolution in agricultural history, I would have chosen to be born on Nov. 3, 1922,” Dick says. “Thanks to my parents, I was.”
Yesterday’s machines
Dick’s collection of larger agricultural implements includes horse-drawn mowing machines, loose hay loader, fan-sweep reaper, grain drill, silage cutter, blower and more – all displayed in the farm’s original barn. Makers such as McCormick-Deering, Walter A. Wood (of nearby Hoosick Falls) and Dillinger are represented, with build dates spanning the 1880s to the 1920s. Though Dick has experience with each of those implements, his favorite piece of large machinery is a threshing machine custom-built by the Butter-worth Co. of Ohio for a very particular businessman who had an excellent market for rye and flax straw.
“I bought the Butterworth from the son of its original owner,” Dick says. “It was delivered new in 1894 and was used until 1916 when it was put away.”
The story of Dick’s Butterworth self-binding thresher begins about 20 miles east of Albany at Averil Park, N.Y., near the point where the northwestern corner of Massachusetts meets the southern border of Vermont. “This man ran about 20 teams of horses and an assortment of wagons and sleds to transport local produce, grain and hay to the port of Albany on the Hudson,” Dick explains. “The goods were then loaded on barges and shipped to New York City.” In the late 1880s, some of the man’s buyers noted that the manufacturers of fine writing paper in the city were having difficulty finding long fiber flax and rye straw (a key source of cellulose) since most threshing machines then in use broke the straw in the process of saving the grain. To make a long story short, the drayman contracted with Butterworth to build a threshing machine that would clean the grain and save the straw.
Butterworth’s straw-saving threshing machine has a 6-foot throat with an 18-inch-wide beater to remove the grain located on its left-hand side. Bundles of flax or rye are fed into the machine with the seed heads to the left. As they pass through the beater, the grain is dislodged, but the straw is left intact. Rather than blowing the straw into a pile or dumping it onto the ground, the Butterworth (equipped with a tying attachment) delivers small bundles of perfectly oriented straw out the back. In practice, about 20 bundles were tied into a bale, and the bales were shipped to paper makers in the city. Today, the machine is complete and in good working condition.
Dairy delights
The stable where Dick and his dad once housed the family’s Percherons now plays host to a wide array of dairy collectibles. Everything from churns, separators and butter workers to milk testing machines, milk coolers, milking stools and even milk bottles are on display. Dick is especially pleased to include a beautifully preserved mechanical milking machine in the collection.
“The American Cow Milker may well be the first mechanical milker ever manufactured,” Dick explains as he removes the relic from its protective case. “The machine won awards, but I don’t think it was really that useful.” Like many early devices, the American Cow Milker needed fairly ideal conditions to function. Even when functioning well, it may not have saved much labor.
The device consisted of four vacuum chambers attached to four natural rubber teat cups that would have required cows with ideal udder configurations to fit. Moving a pair of handles back and forth worked four leather diaphragms that created suction in the teat cups and delivered the milk to a spout through a central accumulation chamber. “An ingenious design, no doubt,” Dick says with a chuckle. “But not a practical tool.” Dick estimates the milker dates to the late 1860s.
Among more recent dairy items in the collection, those relating directly to the McGuires’ Penope Farms Dairy are near and dear to Dick’s heart. “I was always striving for ways to produce higher quality milk,” Dick explains. “One of our first steps was the installation of a stainless steel bulk milk cooler in 1954.” That first bulk cooler, the source of the first bulk-cooled milk sold in the Boston market, is now on display. Today, Penope Farms Dairy milk and cream bottles take a prominent place among the many pieces of dairy glass in Dick’s collection.
Tools of many trades
A significant part of Dick’s tool collection includes handsaws, chainsaws and assorted woodworking tools. In one of his museum rooms, Dick has a full wall of post and beam construction tools on display, including augers for boring mortises and heavy slicks for cleaning them out. In another section of the building, a fine collection of spoke-shaves, in-shaves and draw knives point to the past woodcraft of shaping barrel staves, chair seats, bowls and all manner of wooden spindles and spokes.
Among his cherished carpenter’s tools, one standout is a beautifully detailed chestnut tool chest with an accompanying collection of saws. “The chest was made for utility,” Dick explains, opening its lid. “But it was also advertising for its owner, so it had to be nice.” Near the box stands another treasure – a Shaker saw filing frame. The frame consists of a pair of hardwood jaws whose height and angle can be adjusted to clamp and present any manner of saw blade (not circular) for efficient sharpening and tooth setting. The beautifully simple device’s jaws were even carefully scored along their faces to guide the filer to consistent and appropriate angles.
Dick also has many old hand hay-making tools such as rakes, forks and cutters artfully displayed along broad axes for shaping logs, ice plows, horse collars, eveners and scythes.
Something for everyone
Museums at Penope Farm have been organized around household utensils and furnishings, books and music, laundry and even early American artwork. In the old granary, carved wooden bowls, cast iron kitchenware and even a pair of kerosene stoves and a stovetop oven are nicely displayed around an 1854 parlor stove made in nearby Troy.
In another room carved out of the former hog pen, the focal point is an original 1871 glass-front post box station from the West Hebron Post Office. That beautiful oaken piece of Americana is accompanied by a framed copy of its commission certificate, signed in 1871 by the postmaster general. Dick also displays collections of old bells, a quilt that came with the family from Ireland in 1853, hand-hooked rag rugs, a stamp vending machine, old checkerboards and more.
In other rooms, a library full of books and periodicals from centuries past document appropriate practices for farm and family. A gallery of charcoal drawings celebrate the early artistic life of Jennie Mae McGuire, Dick’s aunt who illustrated magazines in New York City to put herself through college around the turn of the 20th century. An ornate parlor organ, early 1900s sheet music and a collection of early phonograph records bring back memories of fine family fun, while a collection of vintage laundry tools bring back memories of a different sort.
“I want the younger generations to have a chance to experience early American farm life,” Dick explains. “I want people to understand how our ancestors worked, lived and recreated – that was all part of it.” So even as Penope Farm’s fertile fields continue to produce crops for a tenant who employs modern practices, the museums perched atop Scotch Hill celebrate the milestones of progress that guided American agriculture and its farm families to this point in time. And the eastern view is inspiring. FC
For more information:
– Dick and Polly McGuire host visitors at their hilltop haven by appointment. For more information or to schedule a visit to the museums at Penope Farm, contact Dick at (518) 854-3143.
Oscar “Hank” Will III is an old-iron collector, freelance writer and photographer. He splits his time between his home in Gettysburg, Pa., and his farm in East Andover, N.H. Contact him at (717) 337-6068; e-mail: willo@gettysburg.edu