Ag Hall of Fame

Location:  630 Hall of Fame Dr., Bonner Springs, KS.  Just North of the Jct of Hwy K-7 and I-70, take the marked route to the hall of fame.  It is located in Bonner Springs Park, right next to Sandstone.

Town:  Bonner Springs (Kansas City, KS)

Contact:  Ph 913/721-1075

Hours:  Monday-Saturday 9am-5pm, Sunday 1-5pm

There are some things so reliable in life that we tend to take them for granted.  America's farmers and agricultural industry fall into this category.  William Jennings Bryan perhaps said it best: "Destroy your cities, and they will spring back up, as if by magic.  But destroy the farms and grass will grow in the streets of your cities".  This is the truth, there is just no way around it.  Our whole society depends on a plentiful, cheap and safe food supply.  In the distant past, before people got good enough at farming to produce   more food than they and their families could consume, every one had to raise all or part of their own food.  This greatly reduced the time they had to pursue intellectual pursuits.  It was the freeing people from producing their own food that really sparked the rapid advance of ideas and inventions that we all enjoy and pretty much take for granted today.  In today's society, we live in a luxury that could not have even been dreamed of by the richest kings of a few hundred years ago.  Agriculture is the essential foundation.  It is the purpose of the Ag Hall of Fame to honor a few of the outstanding individuals in this field as well as the Ag industry as a whole.   Also preserved here are a few of the milestone inventions along the way.

This is the Ag Hall of Fame.  Honored here are famous individuals such as Thomas Jefferson, who besides being President, was a pioneer in the development of scientific farming practices.  Squanto, who taught the pilgrims how to grow corn, thus preventing their starvation, is also honored here.   Many other famous and less famous individual are honored here, but they all contributed to the improvement of agriculture and  improving our society's standard of living.

The Museum of Farming is also a part of the Ag Hall of Fame.  Housed in this building are some of the milestone machines and devices in the evolution of the farming industry.

This threshing machine was  constructed of wood in the 1880's.  It was driven by horse-power.  Several horses were hitched to wooden spokes and made to walk around in a circle.  This power was transferred to the threshing machine by shafts and belts.  Though quite primitive by modern standards, it was a huge leap forward from beating grain out of the heads by hand, which had been done since Biblical times.

This is an early pull type combine.  Pulled behind a tractor, it greatly sped up the harvest.  This unit, manufactured by Allis-Chalmers in the 1940's, cut a 40" swath of wheat.  This is less than 4 feet.  Many lawn mowers of today are wider than that.  Grandpa had a machine just like the one pictured.  I remember dad telling me that you could start in the morning on a field that you could throw a rock across, work all day, and in the evening, still have a patch left to do that you could throw a rock across.  Still, it was a huge advance from the threshing machine, since one man could do the work that had required a crew of six to ten men to do with a threshing machine.  Modern combines are self-propelled, and the largest of them can cut up to 30 feet of wheat at a time.

As important as the combine is, perhaps no single invention was more important to farming that that of the tractor.  Before this, horses, mules and oxen were used to plow, plant and cultivate the crop.  Though we tend to look back on the time when horse power was used on farms as a romantic period, this was not an easy life for these animals.  Some were literally worked to death in the field.  Tractors could work all day long in the hot sun without a break.   Also, land that had been used to produce hay and grain for the draft animals could now be put to use to raise other crops to either sell or feed to other livestock. 

Also housed in the Museum of Agriculture, is the wind wagon or prairie schooner.  Though more fanciful than practical, these actually did work.  They harnessed the ever present wind and drove across the endless prairie using nothing sail power to propel the craft and passengers.  One such journey started in eastern Kansas and ended just short of Denver, CO in a whirlwind which wrecked the craft.

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