Barb Youngberg and Dennis Healey supervise as volunteers back to front, Jerry Wood, Mitch Zeiger, Josh Wood, A.W. Spoon, George Haigh and Phil McGrath decide how to best move a sled bed onto its frame at the Saratoga Museum.
The Saratoga Museum's homestead cabin exhibit.
As the Platte Valley gets ready to celebrate National Agriculture Week, I took some time to educate myself with the deeply held and longstanding agricultural history and traditions that are part of the very fabric of this Valley.
My first stop was at the Saratoga Museum where director Virginia Parker showed me the mock-up of the interior of a typical pioneer homestead. Parker pointed out that one of the earliest ranchers in the Saratoga area was the Walck Ranch which was homesteaded in 1887 by Don McPhail who came to Wyoming from Scotland, according to Saratoga Museum records. The ranch was purchased by L.E. Walck and was a sheep ranch for years despite having several problems with coyotes.
Early homesteaders lived a very hard life with entire families living in 10-by-10 foot cabins and having nothing but a fireplace to cook on. Parker related a story from a diary in the museum archives where a farmer expresses his displeasure that his wife had only given him girls and no boys to help with the heavy farm work.
My next stop was over at the Grand Encampment Museum where assistant director Amber Horne showed me the new agriculture exhibit she is working on for when the museum re-opens in May. Horne was busy dusting off and organizing a collection of spurs and cow-bells and other turn of the century tools of the agriculture trade including a ice cutting sled used to remove blocks of ice for refrigeration in barns or ice houses. Next Horne gave me a quick tour of the Livery where the museum houses a pioneer wagon and a "state-of-the-art" sheep wagon that was used to keep sheep herders warm on frigid winter and spring nights out on the plains.
On Saturday, I caught up with the group of volunteers who showed up at the Blackhawk Gallery to help move a very large and very old hay-sled that Patty Lufkin donated to the Saratoga Museum. Watching the nearly dozen men carry the hay-sled out in three pieces and reassemble it up at the Saratoga Museum, I couldn't help but marvel at what it must have been like a hundred years ago to hitch up the massive sled in the ice and snow and haul it off to God-knows-where. Let's all tip our hats to those ranchers, farmers, and lumbermen past, present and hopefully future, because I know as sure as that hay-sled now sits in what is probably its final resting place in front of the museum, they sure don't make 'em like that anymore.
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