Hundreds of people visited the Iron Bridge Trailhead at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie over Labor Day weekend, and two of those visitors grew up at the historic site. Alvin (“Al”) and Robert (“Bob”) Schumacher brought together four generations of their extended families to what is now the Iron Bridge Trailhead on Sept. 4 to share their stories of growing up on the Schumacher family farm – “Fairview Farm.” For some of the children, it was the first visit to Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie to hear family stories about farm life in Illinois in the 1930s.

“Those were the years of the Great Depression,” Bob recalled. “People would come out from Joliet on foot to work on the farms out here for a dollar a day.”

Amid groves of hedge apple trees and black walnut trees, they raised white rock chickens and sold their eggs for 10 cents a dozen. Today, farm-fresh eggs cost about $5 a dozen.

Al recalled how his dad took a creative approach to cool milk faster at milking time. He attached a milk stirrer to an oscillating pump that was in place as a mechanism for a well. “The action of the milk stirrer cooled the milk much quicker than just setting the eight-gallon can in water,” Al said.

His dad, Arthur, was also very knowledgeable about cows. “My father learned from his father that the Holstein breed of cows gave the greatest amount of milk and were the easiest to take care of because of their temperament,” Al said. “Other breeds were used for providing cheese and other dairy products.”

“The better cows provided two gallons of milk twice a day,” Al said.

Al told about the day when a group of men from Joliet made an unexpected visit to the one-room schoolhouse where he went to school. The schoolhouse was located about one mile southeast of the farm, in the area where the bison sometimes graze now. The men had escaped from prison, had survived a big snowfall the night before and now they were looking for a place to warm up. “They picked the wrong day,” Al said.

A new display of Schumacher family farm items opened Friday, Sept. 17, at the Joliet Area Historical Museum, 204 N. Ottawa St.

Historic Schumacher family farm items are also on display at the Wilmington Park District community center, which is located at 315 N. Water St., Wilmington.

Items on display include a cornbread pan with seven individual corn cob molds. A set of three cake pans – each with its own mechanical release lever – and an oval-shaped roasting pan are nods to the popular lemon cakes and baked ham, which were popular in the 1920s and were featured in the book The Great Gatsby. There is a 100-year-old thermos, a glass butter churn with a hand-operated wooden paddle mechanism inside; farm maintenance tools and more.

The displays spotlight life in rural America during the era that is widely referred to today as “The Roaring 20s,” which ushered in a distinct wave of new and iconic trends for people living in the cities. There were waist-length pearls for women and fedoras for men. But while a whole new lifestyle defined a celebratory era in Chicago, Joliet and other major U.S. cities, plenty of rural families still painstakingly scoured the farmlands with horse-drawn fertilizer spreaders. Never since has there been greater contrast between rural and urban life in America. The same rudimentary tools that were introduced over 30 years earlier – the butter churn, the hog scraper, the milk stirrer and more – remained essential to life every day. Many families were only just first experiencing the luxury of indoor plumbing. Rural residents continued to embrace a necessary resourcefulness.

Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie Visitor Information Specialist William Shea presents an overview of the items on display in Joliet and Wilmington in this recorded webinar: https://usfs.adobeconnect.com/pkly7jmid6wy/.

Pumpkin Pie, Verna Schumacher

2 eggs

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon cloves

1 and 2/3 cups whole milk

1 ½ cups cooked pumpkin (or 15-ounce can)

¾ cup sugar

½ teaspoon ginger

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

Beat together eggs and sugar; then add in salt. Blend all this and pour into a deep-dish 9-inch pie shell. Bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes, and then decrease temperature to 350 degrees for 45 minutes.

More Schumacher family recipes – for cut sugar cookies, springerle cookies and more – are available on the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie website, here: https://www.fs.usda.gov/detailfull/midewin/home/?cid=FSEPRD953163&width=full.