Home
on the Farm
Everyone in a farm family worked. Men usually planted, cultivated and harvested the
crops and cared for farm animals and tools; women and children helped in the fields, fed
animals, preserved food and kept house.
 The "back porch" exhibit
in the Rural Michigan Gallery displays artifacts from a Michigan farm home: a pie safe,
milk can, butter churn, toy horse and rocking chair. Pie safes were vented on the sides by
decorative punched tin panels that allowed air to circulate inside to help cool baked
goods. Closing the doors kept flies from coming too near the food.
A farm woman often earned money by processing raw milk into butter. She used a butter
churn such as this wooden Champion Churn, made by E. H. Funk, in Sturgis, Michigan, around
1868. When enough cream had been "raised" from the setting of raw milk to fill a
churn, she moved the handle of the churn up and down in a rapid motion until the cream
separated into butter and buttermilk. She then sold or traded the butter in town at the
local general store for goods that her family did not produce, such as fabric or salt.
 When help
was needed for major farm activities, neighboring families assisted each other. In this
scene, members of a rural Michigan community are raising a barn. They had just finished
framing the barn when they gathered to have their photograph taken.
Each rural town had a general store where a wide variety of dry goods, groceries and
product could be purchased. Mail order catalogs offered another source of goods. Aaron
Montgomery Ward started direct mail selling to rural areas in 1872. Fourteen years later,
the forerunner of Sears, Roebuck and Company began selling watches by mail.
The establishment of Rural Free Delivery (R.F.D.) in Michigan in 1896 brought catalog
merchandise to the farmer's mailbox. The free mail service brought everything from seeds
to butter churns and other household wares.
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