The Mor the dairy-er ...

This bag is from the MorMilk Company, which was established in 1902 in Dixon. The concentrate bag is one of many from throughout northwest Illinois that can be found at the Hinrichs’ museum.

Stitches in time ... The Besse Farm Store in Polo and Meyers and Litwiller Inc. in Milledgeville are long gone, but their John Deere green and yellows are still hanging around in the museum.

“We grew up with barns, and when you think about it, the barn is going away,” Kathy said. “If it’s a wooden barn, it’s going away. People in today’s world, they don’t milk in a barn like that; and the farmers that own them, they really can’t use them for anything because their equipment is too big, or they don’t have animals. Some people are preserving them, but it’s an expensive thing to do.”

Another sign of the times?

Signs of the times. Lee’s gathered a collection of vintage farm-related ad signs, but finding them has become a tougher task too, as many signs didn’t survive farmers’ ingenuity, having been cut and bent and repurposed for other uses on the farm; and the ones that did survive have already been picked off walls and put into collections. Some still shine with their original color, but some show their age.

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Local items really intrigue the Hinrichs, whether it’s signage, milk jugs from dairies, or the many rulers and calendars that ag businesses would give away for advertising.

“I like to pick up old signs, but it’s really kind of hard,” Lee said. “The signs have become just enormously expensive because there’s not much around. All of these old farmers that had them, they just got pitched out to the side.”

“Some of them would get used to patch a hole in a building,” Kathy said. “Farmers used what they had. They didn’t go to Menards to get anything.”

Hanging along the ceiling in one of the rooms are a line of old cloth feed sacks from local stores and elevators that are long gone. One of them is for Master Mix Feed, which Lee’s father would get from an elevator in Hazelhurst, east of Milledgeville. Identifying feed sacks can sometimes be a challenge. It’s not always easy to find a sack with the printing still legible. Years of use and washing leave the ink as little more than a faded memory.

“They used to use these feed sacks afterwards for clothes,” Lee said. “They would have instructions to tell you how to remove the ink from the sack. The people back then would cut them up and use them for clothing, dish towels or whatever. Back in the old days, they used everything they had.”

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The right tool for the job ... Hammers, wrenches, soldering irons — if farmers used to use it, chances are pretty good that there’ll be one at the Hinrichs’ museum.

One of the larger pieces at the museum is this manure trough from the Louden Machinery Co. of Fairfield, Iowa. They were used years ago to clean out manure from barns, a method preferable to scooping it out with a shovel. “My dad always said, if you were a rich farmer, you had one of these,” Lee said.

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Although Lee has been around farms and barns his entire life, he still comes across tools and trinkets that he hasn’t laid eyes on before. That’s when his detective skills kick in. He’ll take the time to track down information and learn more about a piece and find out what it was used for. Take for example all the wrenches that line his walls, big and small, curved and straight. Decades ago, farmers didn’t just break out a socket set to bust a bolt loose; there were different wrenches for different jobs.

“Sometimes I have some things that I’m not 100 percent certain what they are, and then someone will know what they were used for,” Lee said. “A lot of people will ask questions about what they were and why they were used.”

Wrenches aren’t the only tools on display: The barns also houses axes, soldering irons, clevises, hacksaws, tile spacers, branding irons, pitch forks, hay hooks, froggers, hinges, fence stretchers, steel tractor seats, gardening tools, thermometers, post pounders and more ± lots more. The Hinrichs’ find the tools as-is and then take time to clean the rust off of them without damaging the item.

Corn knives also are part of the vast collection. One of them has a steel handle on it, and when Lee found it, it rekindled childhood memories.

“We broke so many different corn knife handles that my dad started putting steel handles on them so we wouldn’t break them,” Lee said. “We found one at an auction recently, and I had to get it. It just had to come home with me.”

Elsewhere, shovels of various sizes are lined up along one wall, including one used by phone and electric companies to install poles (see photo on page 15).

“I had someone from Commonwealth Edison come in one day and told me if they put a pole in that was 100 feet tall, it had to be 12 feet in the ground,” Lee said. “I can’t imagine digging 12 feet down by hand. The first couple of feet ain’t bad, but after that it gets pretty rough.”