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The Loudoun Heritage Farm Museum:<\/strong><\/p>\n Preserving Loudoun\u2019s Agricultural History \u2013 East and West<\/strong><\/p>\n By Lori Hinterleiter Kimball<\/p>\n It was not that long ago when Loudoun County was primarily farmland, but land use began to change in the 1960s with the opening of Dulles Airport, and the formation of planned residential communities.\u00a0 By the mid-1990s, a group of citizens was concerned that knowledge of Loudoun\u2019s rich farming history would be lost, and they worked with the Board of Supervisors to establish the Loudoun Heritage Farm Museum within the 350-acre Claude Moore Park in Sterling. \u00a0The county had purchased the land in 1990 to save it from development and to create a much-needed park in eastern Loudoun.<\/p>\n The Museum\u2019s mission is to preserve, promote, and educate people about Loudoun\u2019s rich agricultural history.\u00a0 Exhibits cover all parts of the county and time periods.\u00a0 Two Lovettsville area farmers \u2013 R.T. Legard and Fred George III \u2013 serve on the Museum\u2019s Board of Directors.<\/p>\n Workhorse Collection<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the first projects was restoring the two barns on the property, believed to have been built in the 1940s or 1950s after Dr. Claude Moore purchased the farm.\u00a0 This photo shows one of the barns prior to restoration.\u00a0 Today it houses the museum\u2019s Workhorse Collection, a unique display of horseshoes, harnesses, and equipment from when work horses, also called draft horses, were used to plow, haul, and work the land.\u00a0 The Workhorse Collection is open periodically for special programs and events.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Groundbreaking for the new exhibit hall took place in 1999 and the Loudoun Heritage Farm Museum opened in 2003.\u00a0 Members of the farming community donated equipment for the exhibits and shared their knowledge of Loudoun\u2019s farming history to tell the stories.\u00a0 The core of the Museum\u2019s interpretation is called \u201cThe Country People,\u201d which covers farming from the late 1700s through the present day, and includes topics about slavery, the German influence in northern Loudoun, dairy farming, and the transition from plows to tractors.\u00a0 A colorful 300-foot long mural about agriculture is painted on the wall around the gallery.<\/p>\n George Wenner of Lovettsville<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the exhibits is about bee keeping and features Lovettsville\u2019s own George Wenner, possibly a son of Elder Wilhelm Wenner who came to the German Settlement in the early 1700s.\u00a0 George was born in 1726.\u00a0 Like other children, George had many chores on the farm \u2013 cutting weed around crops; hauling water from a nearby stream; and gathering, sawing, and stacking firewood.<\/p>\n George was responsible for keeping the family\u2019s two bee skeps.\u00a0 One was for pollinating the fruit trees and the other for stealing honey.\u00a0 As is done today, George used smoke to quiet the bees, while snatching honey from their combs.<\/p>\n This straw bee skep is a manmade beehive.\u00a0 Farmers set out skeps to encourage bees to live close to fruit and vegetable plants that relied on pollination.<\/p>\n George died in 1779 and his grave has one of the oldest markers still visible \u00a0in the \u201cOld German Reformed Cemetery,\u201d now known as the Saint James Reformed Cemetery.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n \n \n \n The Legard Family<\/strong><\/p>\n Another local family featured at the Farm Museum is the Legard family.\u00a0 Glenmore Farm has been in the Legard family since the early 1900s.\u00a0 At the time, workhorses provided the power for plowing and hauling.\u00a0 Although gasoline tractors had existed since 1892, the transition to tractor power was slow.\u00a0 Horses outnumbered tractors on American farms until 1955.\u00a0 Robert N. Legard expressed his reservations to the Lovettsville Farmers Club in 1938, saying he \u201cdidn\u2019t like the noise they made, didn\u2019t like the smoke, and didn\u2019t like the smell of them.\u201d\u00a0 But his son Roland must have felt differently, because two years later the Legards purchased an THC Farmall Model H that ran on kerosene but started with gasoline.<\/p>\n By buying their first tractor, Roland industrialized the farm.\u00a0 Horses brought animal strength to human tasks, but tractors accomplished work that animals simply could not do.\u00a0 Glenmore passed to R.T. Legard, Jr. who carries on the family tradition of farming.\u00a0 The Legard family donated to the Farm Museum the Farmall tractor shown in this photo, as well as other farming equipment.\u00a0 R.T. Legard has a collection of antique tractors and farm machinery, and was featured in a video about Loudoun\u2019s farmers.\u00a0\u00a0 It can be viewed here:\u00a0https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=oE-NJg4mVyw<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Waxpool Store\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0The largest exhibit at the museum is the Waxpool General Store.\u00a0 Most of the contents and parts of the store\u2019s fa\u00e7ade came from the original store that once was located at the intersection of Belmont Ridge Road and Waxpool Road in Ashburn.\u00a0 Built around 1898, the Munday and Tillett families owned and operated it until 1943, when it was closed and boarded up.\u00a0 During its heyday, the store also served as a post office and voting precinct, and was a gathering place for the community to catch up on news and stories of the day.<\/p>\n Before the store was demolished, the Tillett family donated the store\u2019s contents, 35 ledger books, and numerous invoices and correspondence to the Heritage Farm Museum.\u00a0 Once an important spot in the Ashburn community, it is now integral to telling the story of farm life in Loudoun County a century ago.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Pidgeon Hill Farm<\/strong><\/p>\n New exhibits in the form of interpretive panels and small displays are frequently added.\u00a0 Most recently the Museum has focused on farming in the Sterling area and on Black farmers in particular.\u00a0 A little-known story is that of the Edds, Fitts, and Ewing families who owned large dairy farms on the north side of Route 7.\u00a0 Today those farms are the planned communities of Countryside and Cascades, but in the early to mid-1900s, they were thriving dairy farms.\u00a0 William and Flora Edds (pronounced Eads) owned approximately 270 acres and called their farm Pidgeon Hill.\u00a0 They transported their milk and the milk of nearby farmers into Georgetown for processing.\u00a0 More information about the Edds family and Pidgeon Hill Farm can be found on the Museum\u2019s blog at https:\/\/heritagefarmmuseum.org\/blog.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We hope you will visit us soon!\u00a0 During Phase 3 reopening guidelines, the Loudoun Heritage Farm Museum is open by appointment Tuesday through Sunday for hour long educational programs and periodic outdoor programs.\u00a0 Information can be found on the museum\u2019s web site https:\/\/heritagefarmmuseum.org\/<\/a>, Facebook, and Instagram.\u00a0 Questions can be directed to Lori Kimball at hfm.executivedirector@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Visitors from the Lovettsville area who have toured the Loudoun Heritage Farm Museum in Sterling for the first time, are pleasantly surprised to find that the Western Loudoun County…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3910,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3909"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3923,"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3909\/revisions\/3923"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"FM](\"http:\/\/www.lovettsvillehistoricalsociety.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/FM-barn.jpg\")
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