Indiana - Day 6 - Round Barn Museum

France Park, Logansport
Thursday, 6 June 2019

today's route

I heard on the radio that Indiana and Michigan farmers are donating hay and other supplies to Nebraska farmers hit by flooding.  That hadn't crossed my mind but makes a lot of sense.  Very nice of them, considering a lot of Indiana farmers haven't been able to plow and plant yet themselves due to heavy rains.

Round Barn Museum

See?  Round barn.

Justifying my trip to the welcome center the other day is my stop today: the Round Barn Museum near Rochester.  I knew I'd seen round barns the other day, and at the welcome center I found a little pamphlet telling me about this museum that I hadn't heard about anywhere else.

view of the ceiling

shows some of the construction

buggy on display

This is the main floor of the barn.  Before I noticed the access door, I found a door into the lower floor, where there's a lot of old equipment stored.

This is also the site of the Fulton County Museum, and in there I learned more about the barns.

Round barns were more economical because the capacity of a circle is larger than that of a rectangle with the same amount of siding.  They're faster and cheaper to build than a post-and-beam barn and can be built by only 2 people.  Also, the livestock would be facing the center of the barn, making it easier to feed them.

In the early 1900s, there were as many as 225 round or multi-sided barns in Indiana, but only 73 were left by 2017.  Indiana is subject to tornadoes and wind storms, and nothing can stand up against that forever.   The museum is trying to save as many as possible and will give you one for free, as long as you're willing to move it and restore it.

Fulton County Museum

remember I said the other day that I'd seen this barn?  here's proof

old radios

dollhouse & furniture - early 1900s

The museum had pump organs and a player piano with many rolls of music.

They had memorabilia for Elmo Lincoln (a Fulton County native), cinema's first Tarzan.

They had stereoscopes and clothing and handcarved wooden dolls.  They had artifacts from the Peru Circus.  They had old telephones and a switchboard and old adding machines.  They've got a lot of stuff that's been in Fulton County, Indiana, for a very long time.  It was really interesting seeing the collection.

1877 wedding dress

model barn - 4-H project - State Fair blue ribbon winner

I walked the dogs a couple of times around the area and found lupines in a field near the highway.  They're the first ones I've seen this year.  It was nice to see some white ones mixed in with the blue.

I also saw plaques noting this site as near the beginning of the "Trail of Death," the forced march in 1838 of the Potawatomi tribe.  More than 850 men, women and children were forced at gunpoint to walk 660 miles to what's now called Osawatomie, Kansas.