Domestic Items
These items would have been used around the house and farm to make day-to-day life a little easier. As farms became more specialized and commercial in the later agricultural period, more “luxury” items started to appear in rural areas.
Drying Rack for Clothing
Using this drying rack required more attention than today’s electric dryers. Nonetheless 19th century families fortunate enough to own one were able to streamline the process of drying and pressing clothes and linens with this design.
Snowshoes
During the snowy winters that comprised much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries every farm family needed a good pair of snowshoes to enable them to get to the barn, the sugarbush or out on the hunt. Using them for recreational purposes would have been uncommon in that day.
Milk Jugs
With the onset of the dairy age in the late 1800’s milk jugs such as these became fixtures on farms throughout the Berkshires. Gradually as larger, more commodity oriented farms supplanted the smaller subsistence farms of the earlier period, dairy became the major agricultural enterprise in the region and that continued well into the 20th century.
Rosenburg Lawn-mower
Art Rosenburg, the final caretaker on the Buxton Farms property while under the Hopkins family ownership, used a mower such as this for tidying up the lawn around the buildings and gardens.