Living History Farms

Just west of Des Moines near Urbandale sits a five-hundred-acre open-air museum built on a simple idea: history is better lived than displayed under glass. Iowa State agricultural economist William Murray founded Living History Farms in nineteen seventy, and from the start the staff planted real crops, raised real livestock, and cooked real food on working farmsteads representing Iowa life in seventeen hundred, eighteen fifty, and nineteen hundred. The museum became famous far beyond Iowa on October fourth, nineteen seventy-nine, when Pope John Paul the Second celebrated an outdoor Mass here before a crowd of roughly three hundred forty thousand people, one of the largest public gatherings in Iowa history. The farms remain open to visitors today, with costumed interpreters working the fields through the growing season.