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E-mail This StoryThe highly anticipated Scout Day at the Heritage Farmstead Museum has returned to Plano after a two-year hiatus.
"We started to prepare and market this year's Scout Day and it just snowballed from there," said Kathy Strobel, director of education at the Heritage Farmstead Museum. "We're expecting more than 500 Boy and Girl scouts and at least 150 parents and leaders."
Strobel said past Scout Days attracted between 200-300 people, including scouts and chaperones.
The museum recruited 50 volunteers to help handle the massive crowd this year. Even still, museum staff members are confident the scouts and leaders will have plenty to learn and do on the four-acre farm property.
Scout Day is a field trip for Boy and Girl scouts in Plano to the Heritage Farmstead Museum, where they spend the day experiencing life in the 1800s.
"It's a great day for kids to get unplugged and away from the PlayStations and Xboxes," Strobel said. "There'll be a multitude of fun turn-of-the-century activities for them and the chaperones to do."
The scouts will, among many other things, milk cows, ride a mule-driven cart and wash laundry by hand. They will also see demonstrations in blacksmithing, farming and chuck-wagon cooking.
The Heritage Farmstead Museum consists of an authentically restored 14-room 1895 Victorian farmhouse, complete with all of its original outbuildings. Truly a "community museum," the four-acre site underwent a seven-year, $1.7 million restoration paid for by the Plano community in 1986. During 1996, nearly 400 volunteers invested more than 10,000 hours of volunteer time in various Museum programs.
The Heritage Farmstead Museum opened to the public in 1986 for the purpose of interpreting rural life on the Blackland Prairie in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The museum's main building is the restored 1891 Farrell-Wilson House, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The four-acre site consists of seven restored original outbuildings, including a potting house, smokehouse, two working blacksmith shops, pole barn, chicken house, ram barns and the foreman's cottage. A livestock collection of chickens, ducks, rabbits, sheep, a mule and donkey complete the historically recreated environment. The Heritage Farmstead Museum is located at 1900 West 15th St. in Plano.
Conact Kim Nguyen at knguyen@acnpapers.com
