The Farm at Prophetstown

Today I'm talking with Sunshine at The Farm at Prophetstown. You can follow on Facebook as well.

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00:00
This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Sunshine at the farm at Prophetstown. Good afternoon, Sunshine. How are you? Hello. Hi. I'm doing wonderful here in Indiana. Good. It's really funny because I call my kids.

00:29
Well, I used to call my kids or grownups now, but when I would wake them up, I would say, good morning sunshine. So the minute I saw your name, I was like, oh. Yes, I get a lot of people who go, that's cute, but what's your real name? I'm like, well, it is, but it is unique. People do remember me. Oh, I would imagine so. Is it because your parents were of the hippie generation or what's the story? Yes.

00:58
Yes, that's it. Okay. I think it's beautiful. I think that being called sunshine all the time would be a lovely way to live my life. Okay, so tell me about what you do at the farm and then tell me about the farm. Sure. The farm at Prophetstown is a 1920s living history museum located inside of Prophetstown State Park.

01:27
I at the farm am in charge of our marketing, our website, our social media, our school tours, any kind of regular tour, anything public facing. I kind of consider myself an experience enhancer in a way. What a wonderful job, yes.

01:52
Yes, it's super fun. My previous job I did the same things, but I worked at a university. I worked at Purdue. So this was a totally different environment for me. I did not grow up on a farm. So everything I do here is kind of first for me in a way, even though my day-to-day job and what I'm doing as far as event planning and

02:20
tours and interacting with people. I'm very familiar with the course, but the farm itself and everything's a little different. Example, today it was our first snow here. So it's the very first time I'm seeing snow on the farm, but now we have a little bit of a mini, I don't know, it's not a blizzard, but it looks like a blizzard outside the window. I bet it's absolutely beautiful.

02:50
It really is. When I first pulled into the drive this morning, the sun just came up and to see that snow on the barn, just beautiful and the horses out. Our farm is six on a hundred acres. We operate on about 25 acres and the rest we use for our feed alfalfa.

03:16
We have several animals that we take care of year round. So our farm is open year round every day, seven days a week from 10 in the morning to 5 PM. We have three horses, three goats, three cows, six pigs, three sheep. We have a bunch of chickens, about 65 chickens, two turkeys, 11 ducks.

03:45
two farm cats. I'm thinking if I missed anyone out of all them animals. Is there a dog? No, we do not have a dog. Okay. We do have a mini horse and a donkey. Okay, well that's a pass little animals right there. Yes, and so we care for those animals every day. We have a staff of about six part-time farm hands.

04:11
And so our day begins, I come in in the morning, I open the farm, and then from there, the farm hands will start doing their, letting the animals out, feeding them, doing all the morning chores about 9 a.m. And then we will repeat it again about 4 p.m. in the afternoon and we button up the farm by 5 o'clock and we all leave. Okay, so.

04:39
It might seem weird that I'm talking to Sunshine about this place in Indiana, but I really love places like yours because I, when I was in school, we went on a field trip to a farm in Maine called Norland's Farm, N-O-R-L-A-N-D-S. And I don't know if that's what it's still called now cause I'm older now. It was quite a while ago, but it was a living history place and kids would go there for field trips.

05:08
and everybody on the farm was in character from like the late 1800s. And it was really fun, partly because one of the girls in my class, I think it was middle school, junior high, she had nail polish on. And nail polish wasn't a thing they did in the late 1800s. And the woman who was taking us through the experience of what we were doing.

05:35
She saw her hands and she said, did you damage your fingernails? And the girl looked at her and said, no. And she said, oh, well, they're all red. I thought they might be sore. And she stayed right in character. And at the time, all of us girls were just like, oh, yeah, okay, yeah, that makes sense. There wouldn't have been red nail polish in the late 1800s, especially not on a kid that age. But as an adult,

06:03
that could have gone one of two ways. We all could have taken it in stride and then like that makes sense, or that kid could have gotten picked on for the next five years in school because she was the one that stuck out. So I'm sharing the story because I thought it was interesting. And then there's a place here in Minnesota where I am, and it used to be called Murphy's Landing. It is now called The Landing. And they take people on tours through

06:31
acreage that is basically a small town and they've brought in buildings that are from the late 1800s, early 1900s. And they have cows and they have chickens and they have goats and I think they have sheep. And basically if you go on a guided tour, you get to go in the houses that are set up the way they were in the past. You get to see the cook stoves and things and you get to interact with the animals. So in saying all that, I

07:00
Are you guys, when you do events, are you in character or are you just kind of walking people through and explaining things? We are not in character every day. We do have a special day that we designate and make it our living history day and we do get into some outfits. But it's very more fun, loose. I have visited other places where they are in character like that. I actually...

07:29
just went to Ohio for a work trip just to kind of experience another living history farm. And they did that. They were in character through the whole time. We're not quite to that level, although we do think that that's neat. We, our property, we have two Sears and Robuck houses, and one of those was moved in from the town that's not far from us. And it was actually

07:59
And so we moved it in and we made it a museum home. And then our big farmhouse was a replica of one from the Sears catalog. And both homes are open to everybody every day so you can come in. And we don't really have anything like roped off. Like you do step back in time when you come in. It feels like a 1920s home, but you can actually touch everything, move around.

08:29
do pretty much anything you would like to do. We try to kind of make it feel like you could even sit down and have a conversation with your family and we do box lunches. You could eat a lunch and sit and just enjoy the space. We also do have our barnyard area. And so you can come through the homes, you can go out the back, interact with the animals. It depends on how much time you have, how much you wanna learn.

08:59
but we try to kind of focus more on self-guided tours for people so that they can do it at their own time and pace. Nice. Okay, so what's the history on this? How did this place come to be? Sure. The farm itself started with a group of individuals that really wanted to not lose the history of Indiana agriculture.

09:29
And so they looked and they thought, well, if we were to make a museum of some place that kind of connected agriculture along with, in this area, we have a very big Native American history with Prophetstown and the Battle of Tippecanoe. So there's a lot of that history. So they decided to kind of make it.

09:55
more of like an event center where it would have a museum, it would have a Native American facet to it, an event center, a farmhouse, you know the early plans I saw it. But over time, you know it became a little bit too big for the group to handle and then the state was at the same time looking to acquire a new state park and so they kind of both met and

10:24
work together and decided to kind of scale down what the group was really wanting to do with the museum and focus just on 1920s agriculture and then they let the park take over the prairie lands and the Native American side of it and they came in and they bought you know the land and started developing it for a state park and all of this happened around 1999.

10:52
and the farm opened in 2000. And it was just one farmhouse and a barn. And then over the years it grew, you know, farm animals were added, the other home was brought in, outbuildings were built, things just started kind of growing. And then the park itself grew around us. So we have prairie lands and they do have the Native American structures.

11:21
They have tours they do. So we kind of work in unison with the park, even though we're not really a park employee. We kind of sit in the middle of the park. Wow, huh, that's unusual. So I'm impressed that that's happening that way. Yes, it is. We're very unique. From my understanding, we are the only working kind of nonprofit of the size that we are inside of a state park.

11:51
in the entire United States. And I think that they might have a couple satellite, smaller things in, I think in California they have one and I heard of somewhere else, but nothing to the scale of what we do. So our visitors mainly come from the campground. They have a big campground here of about 220 campsites.

12:17
So all of those people, our audience is constantly changing from May to, you know, through Labor Day. We will have people from all over the United States visit us. But then we also have from our local community of people wanting to enjoy the park and then come in and enjoy the farm because we are free. Everything here that we do is, you know, we're a nonprofit. So we want to make it accessible for everybody.

12:45
Okay, so if you're a non-profit, how do you fund it? Because you can't fund it without money. Yes, so we sell our beef and our pork, and that provides us some financial gains there. We have a small gift shop inside, and we do farm-to-table meals. We have a full kitchen in the basement. We sell box lunches on the weekends, and then we have a lot of donations.

13:15
A lot of people support us and they feel that we are a very important educational place for our schools and people to learn and hang on to the history. Shout out to your supporters because we need people to support places like yours. Absolutely. Yeah. I kind of, we like to say here that the farm is our third, is

13:42
is somebody's third place. Have you ever heard about a third place? No. So a third place would be, you know, your home is your first place. That's where your family lives and where you feel comfortable and you live and do everything you do. Your second place, then when you leave your home is your work. That's, you know, you're providing, you have your friends. You know, it takes up most of your time away from home. But then most people have a third place.

14:12
And we want to be that. We want to be that third place where you go outside of your home, outside of work, to unwind, to just relax, to feel a part of something. And that's what we like to say. We're everybody's third place. Huh, I had never heard that phrasing before. And you're right. I think almost everyone has a third place.

14:39
Yeah, mine used to be a library. You know, that used to be my third place I would go and I made it a point in my week to go there. And so now, you know, my third place of course is a farm, but that's what I try to tell people is, you know, when you come here and you first drive down our lane and you see that barn and you come around the bend and you see the farmhouse, you're already kind of feeling peaceful. You're already getting away from

15:08
town and from your notifications, you know, even though we do have internet, it's not very good out here. So you really are disconnected. My third place when I was growing up was either the library, just like you, or being in the woods in the forest because in Maine, there's lots of forests, there's lots of trees. Yes.

15:35
And as a grown up, it didn't change much. In Minnesota, it was a library or being out on the public trails, those state-owned land trails. So, yeah, I think that if I lived anywhere near the farm that you're at, I would probably see you as a third place now that I know what that means. That's super cool. I didn't know that phrasing existed. Yeah.

15:58
And you know, I hope that anybody that might be listening to this podcast and maybe is a camper. Yeah. And they're traveling through, you know, Prophetstown State Park Campground is one of the top campgrounds in the entire United States. So hopefully, if it's not on their bucket list, they add it now. And then while they're here, they come over here and they visit the farm. Because it's really a treasure. Yes. What's the biggest city near you?

16:28
That would be West Lafayette. Okay. And that's Purdue University. So Purdue is very large. So anybody coming in maybe to see a sports game at Purdue, we are about five miles from Purdue. Wow. Okay. And what's the major highway nearby? 65. So that we, 65, if you were to get on there, would take you of course to the farm. But if you went...

16:57
An hour and a half north you would be in Chicago, and if you went an hour south, you would be in Indianapolis. Okay, that helps me. Like I said, I grew up in Maine, I live in Minnesota, and my parents still live in Maine. So when we go home, we do road trips from Minnesota to Maine, and we go through Illinois and Indiana. So I was trying to get a picture in my head of where you're at on the map. Okay, cool. What else can I ask you? Oh, when...

17:26
I'm assuming that schools come to visit you guys as a field trip. How does that go? How are the kids, what are they like? What are their reactions to stuff if they've never been to a place like yours? It's interesting. We do ages from pre-kindergarten all the way up through high school. But I would say the bread and butter of most are between first grade and fourth grade. And they...

17:54
This farm has been a part of their school typically every year they'll come. So they'll start with first grade and all the way up. So, you know, when a trip comes in, I'm like, who's been to the farm before? And, you know, I love to see all the hands because, you know, they've been here. And the ones that haven't been, they've heard from their classmates about it. But basically, we will do a

18:21
We'll kind of bring them into the big farmhouse. We'll sit down. We'll talk about, you know, what does this room look like that's different from your home? You know, what are you noticing? You know, what right away? And you know, like there's no television. Because in the 1920s, they didn't have that. And we have a radio going with old timey 1920 radio shows. So we'll talk about that. We'll talk about the Sears catalog, that it was the Amazon of the day.

18:51
and you know, I'll pull out some antiques and show them. I try not to do too much of the old timey stuff in the house, because kids get bored with that. They really want to see the animals, but I try to give them a little bit of history and then get them outside and get them around those animals and let, you know, we'll pull out some of the animals like our donkey and let them pet them and teach them a little bit about.

19:19
how things used to be on a farm and show them, you know, we have old cars here, we have a Model T, a 1926 Model T, and, you know, old tractors and, you know, I'll show them, I'll go look at this picture, look at this tractor, and this is how we farm. But here's how we farm now, kind of show that history. So I think it's good, I think they really enjoy it.

19:47
Okay, so in the classroom situation, in the 1920s, would it have been still like the little chalkboards and chalk that you had at your desk and the primer books? Is that right? Yes. Okay. So do you guys have that to show them? No, we don't have a schoolhouse. We have talked about it. It is something that we want, but that would have to come from a donor and from donations and we just haven't got there yet.

20:16
There's a lot of things that we look for and we would love to have. We would love to have a mercantile, a building where we could actually sell things out of. These are all goals and things as we grow, we hope to have one day. Okay. I misunderstood. For some reason, I was picturing a classroom and you were talking about them being in the house. No, they come right inside the house. Gotcha. Okay. I bring them right into the living room.

20:45
We have a living room, a dining room, a kitchen. We have a bedroom. I'm actually sitting in a bedroom right now just because my internet's a little better here. But it's really just a big farmhouse that kind of feels like grandma's farmhouse. Does the kitchen have a cook stove in it? It does. It is wood burning. It has water in it and we'll fire that up and we'll cook things on it.

21:14
And we'll have events around that. Now we won't do that for a school tour. They're on a limited time. They got an hour with me, but we do events every weekend through our busy season. And so we'll make cornbread, we'll make homemade butter. We'll have iced tea on the front porch. We'll have homemade ice cream. We try to capture those 1920s things. Even the breeds of our animals are 1920s.

21:43
Fun. So awesome sunshine. I love it. Okay, so here's the thing I wanna say about these places like yours. You guys do a fantastic job of showing what it was like and a lot of fun and cool things. But back in the 1920s or the late 1800s, like the places that I've been to, the world was a very different place in a lot of ways. And...

22:11
Being on a farm was hard back then. It's hard now, but it was really hard back then because if you got hurt, you didn't have as many things to help you as you do now. And if your animals got sick, you didn't necessarily have a vet that you could take them to or they could have, they could come out to see your animal right away. So I feel like that timeframe has been very romanticized and for a good reason, because it's very romantic. It's a very...

22:41
pretty picture that we have been sold. And I'm okay with that. I want kids to enjoy themselves. I want them to learn how things used to be done. But I also want people to understand that that late 1850s, early 1900s was a rough time of life for people sometimes. Yes, it is. And when we have tours come through or we are talking with children, we try to...

23:08
Of course, we're not going to say, oh, our pigs are going to go off and be processed. So they may not be here the next time that you come through, but we want them to know where their food comes from. And so we try to, the best way we can, depending on their age, is explain to them, these animals may be here for your enjoyment, but these were food and this is food and this is where your food that you're eating is coming from.

23:38
And you know the best way that we can to capture that and share it. We do have a blacksmith on site also and so we will talk to the kids about how the blacksmith was a vet and he would care for the horses, things like that. So they could kind of understand but we don't go too deep there because yes it does take away that romanticizing.

24:08
the living on a farm. And we try to kind of stay period time. Some things we know we're out of like, you know, a 1920s farm wouldn't have 65 chickens and tons of breeds, but the kids really liked that. So some things we kind of were a little loose on and other things were not. Cool.

24:33
So tell me, tell me what a 1920s farm in Indiana would have been like, because I have no idea what it would have been like. Yeah, well, we do have a windmill and we actually got it working and a windmill was a very big part of a farmer's life. And an Indiana farmer typically, he would have, he would live in this home that is our museum home, our bigger one. And then he would have a smaller home.

25:02
which would be the tenant farmhouse. And that would be where his kind of farm, his lead farmhand would live with his family. And they really would save their money because they wouldn't have to pay rent of any sort, just work the land. And they would have one or two choices, kind of save that money to buy their own farm if that was their dream. Or sometimes tenant farmers really just enjoyed living on the farm and like...

25:32
how they lived and not go and get a bigger farm. It could be a headache. But most of the time they would save up and move on. In Indiana, I think that there was about, I wanna say a hundred thousand Sears homes that were sold. Most of those were on farms. And I think that windmills providing that

25:59
that water and not having to be near a water source helped Indiana's agriculture. And they could have, you know, hundreds and hundreds of farms. I think probably at this time in the 1920s everywhere were farms that looked just like ours. But now, you know, it's hard for us to find any that look like us nowadays. Yeah, they look very different now. You mentioned the Sears and Roebuck homes that people used to be able to order.

26:29
Not everyone knows about that. I know about that, because my parents told me about it a long time ago. So can you explain a little bit about the Sears and Roebuck homes and how that worked? Yes, they were very popular in Indiana and I believe Illinois also, probably other states, but that's really all I know. And the catalogs themselves had everything from bullets to underwear. You could get everything you wanted, just like Amazon today. But the big thing was the house.

27:00
and they would arrive on a rail car that the particular house I'm sitting in right now would have needed four complete rail cars to build this home. And they would arrive, the walls would be built, they would even have wallpaper on them. He would pick out everything from the catalog. And then it would arrive and then they would go around to the local farms around them and say, oh, my house is arriving this day.

27:29
And they would, okay, and the farm wives would start prepping food and the men would get ready and they would all get together and work with their neighbors and put the houses together for each other. And the farm wives would cook a big feast and it was kind of a family farming event that was done across Indiana. So it was like a house raising, not a barn raising. Correct. Okay. And how much

27:59
on average would a home like that cost? Do you know? This particular house was $3,176 and it's about 2,000 square feet. Wow. Okay. And what would that equate to in dollars today? Do you have any idea? Oh goodness. No, Mary. I'm sorry. I don't. No, that's okay. Don't worry about it. It would equate to a lot today is what it would equate to. Yes. Yes, it would.

28:29
So I wanna compare it to like the prefab homes that you can have built for you now. My parents, when they bought their land, there was no house on it, like 12 years ago. And they decided to have the house put together for them and brought in in two halves. And they basically picked out exactly the home that they wanted. And my mom has video.

28:58
from their phone, I think, of the two halves of the house being brought in on flatbed trucks. And the first one was placed, and then the second half was placed, and it was lengthwise. So the back of the house was placed on the foundation. The front of the house was placed against the back of the house. And then they went in and sealed everything up. It is so cool.

29:23
And that's not how it worked in the 1920s. I mean, you had to build the framework and the whole bit. You had to build the house from the supplies, right? Yes. Yeah. So I think the Sears catalogs gave people a more affordable way to have a home that looked nice. Yeah. But it also, I think it gave them a way to raise it quickly.

29:51
because it was hard work living on a farm. And the farm didn't stop because you are putting up a home. So it took a lot of work. I mean, every member of the family is working every day to survive. And you're bringing in other people to help you put this house up, but you're still having to take care of the farm and getting things ready for feeding the animals and all that's going on. So...

30:20
I think it gave them a way to kind of move stuff forward quickly. And I think people today look for that quick, quick house too. You see that with the prefab homes, like what you're talking about. Sometimes people build them out of shipping containers I see now. Yes. Homes and tiny homes you can buy on Amazon. So maybe we're going back in a way to those pre early homesteading days and realizing, you know, these things worked. Why?

30:49
Why go away from it? Yeah, or you can be like us and buy a remodeled home. Which is what we did. And we love it. We love it here. We've been here over four years now and we love it. Okay, so the Sears and Roebuck company that you're talking about became the Sears Department Stores that are basically not around anymore, right? That's correct. And they were the first radio station too. I don't know if you've heard of WLS out of Chicago.

31:19
I have not, no. Well, it was a Sears radio station. They were very similar to Amazon of today, if you really look at it in that way, because here they're selling everything out of a catalog, but then they're like, well, they didn't know about TVs, of course, but radios are everywhere. Okay, we need our own radio station. So let's build a radio station and then talk about our catalog. So that...

31:48
That's really what they did. But Chicago, and then from there, they were like, okay, let's just now we have department stores. And they're Sears department store. So they were really an entrepreneur. They were very, very good at marketing is what they were. So Christmas, well Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming up. Do you guys decorate the farmhouse? We do. It's decorated right now. We are on top of it.

32:16
We got our Christmas tree up last week and we're prepping last-minute things. We have breakfast with Santa Claus That we will have and everybody will come into the farmhouse with their kids and sit down at tables and then we'll have Santa near the tree and Then we will have Christmas on the farm Where actually Santa will be outside in the barn people can walk and would would dress up the animals and some Christmas

32:45
attire and people love to see that and we'll have Christmas caroling, hot cocoa, just all that magic that comes with Christmas on a farm. I am so envious because I freaking love Christmas and I love everything that goes with it. So the Christmas tree, I am a huge fan of Christmas trees. I don't care what kind of tree it is as long as it's alive and it smells good.

33:15
when back in the 20s, they didn't have electric Christmas lights for the tree, right? No, no, they had candles. Yeah. Actually, and that, that now, yeah, we of course do have a tree and we don't, we don't do that, of course, that'd just be too dangerous. But yeah, they, they had a lot of different slimmed down festivities. Yeah. But most of their stuff

33:45
revolved around making things and so we try to still capture that and so we have an event coming up That will be where we will make Garland for your Christmas tree. Yep, and that's really what they did and they strung up popcorn and cranberries and that's what we will do here Yeah, and I I may be wrong, but I swear I read a book at one point where they use dried

34:13
orange peels too for that garland, but that might not be true because oranges were probably hard to come by. Yeah, I would think so. It would be really pretty though. Yes, yes, I think so. And you know, the 1920s was an innovation, you know, that was horsepower to engine. You know, that's the time period right there. You know, the car came out along with the tractors. And so, you know, a farmer had to choose. Do I want to get a car?

34:43
Or do I want to get a tractor? And most of the time they would get a car because they still had horses and horses could pull that plow. So a lot of times they, they didn't have the money for both. Um, but I think in cities that might be more progressive, they might've had that. They might've had the oranges and they might've had a lot different festivities and somebody in Indiana rural limited supplies. Yeah.

35:12
Yep, absolutely. And did were paper chains a garland then too? Yes, paper chains. We make those and we put those around. Anything homemade pretty much we try to do. Yeah, a friend of mine gave me a handmade garland that is it's like a cross between tatting and crochet.

35:39
And it's really pretty. I don't know what it's made of, but it's a like a light beige color um yarn and it has these little gold beads that are in the middle of each stitch. And I use that on my tree every year because it's just so gorgeous and I know the work that went into making it. Yes, I my granddaughter just turned one and she lives about five hours from me and so she'll get to experience a farm for the first time.

36:09
um, next week. And so she'll get to, to see Santa here on the farm. And then we are in the Christmas parade with the horse, the horse is pulling us. We have a Christmas sleigh. And so, I mean, it's just magical. And the kids just light up when they see us, cause they know the farm. Does the sleigh have sleigh bells on it? Yes. I love it. Oh my God. If I was.

36:38
If I was a little bit richer, I would be begging my husband to drive me to Indiana for one of these weekends. It sounds so fun. You said your granddaughter? Is that? Yes. How old? She's one years old. Oh man. She's going to be just so excited and overwhelmed at the same time. I know. I'm so excited to see her. So she arrives next week and so it's all perfect timing.

37:06
She's gone sleep really good that night. Yes, she is. Well, how fun for you. That'll be awesome. All right, well, Sunshine, we've been talking for 37 minutes, and I try to keep these to half an hour. So I'm going to let you go. But thank you for your time today and entertaining me with your stories, because I had a blast talking with you. Oh, wonderful. Well, absolutely. Follow us on Facebook. See our pictures. We're very good about sharing pictures.

37:35
We have a professional photographer who goes to every one of our events and captures every moment. So take a peek at our photo albums. And I enjoyed talking with you. Thank you for your interest in our farm. You are so welcome. And if anybody is local who wants to go to these events in the next coming weekend, go, go see the farm. Yes, absolutely. Our next event will be December 6th.

38:02
which would be our popcorn Christmas tree garland day. And then our breakfast with Santa is December 7th. And then we'll be in the Christmas parade December 7th in the evening. So keep an eye out for us and think of us for your third place. Yes, absolutely. All right, thank you, Sunshine so much. Have a great afternoon. You too, bye bye.