Living History Farms: Iowa's Five-Hundred-Acre Time Machine

The five-hundred-acre open-air museum in Urbandale was the idea of an agricultural economist who thought conventional museums were doing it wrong. Dr. William G. Murray, a professor at Iowa State University and two-time candidate for governor, believed that putting farm equipment under glass taught people almost nothing. He wanted a place where history was lived, not observed.

Living History Farms opened to the public in nineteen seventy and has operated ever since as a working demonstration of Iowa's agricultural past across three periods: an Ioway Indian village from around seventeen hundred, a frontier farm from eighteen fifty, and a horse-powered farm from nineteen hundred. Interpreters in period dress plant, harvest, cook, and craft using the tools and methods of each era. Iowa is one of the most thoroughly farmed landscapes in the world, with roughly ninety percent of its land in agricultural use, but most of that history is invisible from the road. Living History Farms is one of the few places where you can watch someone actually break prairie sod and understand what it took to turn this ground into the breadbasket it became.