The museum, housed in two barns on the county fairgrounds, started in 2009 after some of the county’s older residents expressed a desire to preserve the area’s farming heritage. It’s a mix of machines and farming equipment, household items and displays showing Garfield County history.
Pomeroy, population 1,279, is the county seat for Garfield County and sits about halfway between Dayton and Lewiston, Idaho, along Highway 12. The county is home to an aging generation of wheat farmers and has fewer people than any other county in the state.
Franks hopes the museum will help preserve the mostly oral history of what life was like on the region’s early wheat farms before that generation farms out. Interest in the displays is greater among older people, he said, who remember using butter churns and sewing clothes by hand at home.
The first three times Jenelle Branson tried to buy a Caterpillar 15 tractor, the owners told him no.
But eventually, he was able to make a deal and relocated the 1929 tractor from its former home in Orange County, California.
“When I saw it, I wanted it because I knew what it would look like when it was finished,” he said. Branson hauled it 1,300 miles to his small farm south of Spokane off the old Palouse Highway.
The tractor, restored and repainted in its original yellow, now sits in the Eastern Washington Agricultural Museum in Pomeroy. It’s one of hundreds of relics from the older days of wheat farming in Eastern Washington, when work was done by hand and kids learned to hitch horses, climb telephone poles and lift heavy sacks of grain.
Fuente: The Spokesman-Review