O Pioneers!

Outside Buffalo, New York, lives a man named Ed Winter who collects old machines. He has dozens of steam engines and tractors and railroad cars, but the centerpiece of the assemblage is a twenty-fourfoot flywheel salvaged from a factory that was being demolished. It’s painted bright red and stands upright on a platform near the road, where it makes an arresting sight for passing motorists. As a lawn ornament it certainly beats plastic flamingos and cast-iron jockeys.

I visited Mr. Winter’s spread a while ago with a group of machine lovers, and in the bus coming back we were marveling at how he and his sons had been able to acquire so many artifacts and keep them all in running order. Then a couple in the seat behind me said that yes, the collection was impressive, but it paled in comparison with Harold Warp Pioneer Village, in Minden, Nebraska. “If you’re really interested in this stuff,” one of them said, “Minden is the place. Have you ever been there?”

Even my best friends don’t know that I’ve never been to Minden, but I was disarmed by the directness of the question, so I stammered that while I had never been there personally, my father did grow up in Omaha. They agreed that this was almost as good but urged me to consider a visit nonetheless. It would make an excellent article for Invention & Technology , they said.

I thought about it for a moment. “Let’s see—there’s a writer we’ve worked with who lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Is that anywhere nearby?”

“Well …” They looked at each other doubtfully. I later discovered that the question had revealed me for the lifelong Northeasterner that I am; Madison turns out to be about as close to Minden as it is to Pittsburgh or Memphis. People from my part of the country tend to assume that every state is roughly the size of Vermont, though anyone who’s driven through Iowa will tell you that it’s at least a hundred times as big. To someone whose life is measured in subway stops, the heartland seems impossibly vast.

I searched my brain for contacts in central Nebraska but came up with none. “I suppose I could go there myself,” I told the couple, “except things are pretty busy these days … and I really don’t like to travel… and …”

The woman looked directly into my eyes. “Fred,” she said, “go to Minden.”

So I went.

Pioneer Village makes no bones about what its purpose is. “See How America Grew,” its stationery shouts. “Showing Man’s Progress Since 1830,” a brochure proclaims, calling Pioneer Village “The Only ‘Museum of Progress’ in the U.S.A.” Another handout describes it as “a memorial to the common man who made America great.” An information sheet explains lyrically: “For thousands of years man lived quite simply. Then like a sleeping giant our world was awakened. In a mere hundred and fifty years of eternal time, man progressed from open hearths, grease lamps and oxcarts to television, supersonic speed and atomic power. Here at Pioneer Village you see the actual development of this astounding progress as it was unfolded by our forefathers and by ourselves.”

Such a straightforward sense of mission is out of fashion these days. A recent article on the Computer Museum in Boston, for example, commends the way it “raises questions about adverse effects of computers such as depersonalization, technological unemployment, and threats to privacy” but complains that a display of microprocessors in stereos and other consumer items does not address “social issues of power and access.” The Henry Ford Museum has rounded out its presentations to include such matters as labor relations and the environment (see “Made in America,” Invention & Technology , Winter 1994), and all across the country, whether the subject is textiles or mining or aviation, museums are updating themselves to show losers as well as winners and to explain what had to be sacrificed to make the things in their collections possible.

Each new invention, these museums seem to tell us, creates problems as well as solving them; what with wage slavery and toxic wastes and financial manipulations and the loss of traditional ways, sometimes you wonder if it was worth spending all those lonely nights in the barn perfecting an improved wool carder or sorghum mill. At Pioneer Village, by contrast, everything is progress, growth, improvement.

And why not? Ever since the Great Plains were first surveyed by white men, the story of the region was indeed a story of growth, of a constant striving for more—more settlers, more crops, more cattle, more education, more culture, more conveniences. A state’s progress could be measured by how many people it had, by how far into its remotest corners they extended, by the amount of corn or wheat or beef they produced, by how much time they could spend improving themselves instead of simply struggling to avoid starvation. Those who could help move things forward did, and those who couldn’t take it got out, but everyone knew what direction the Plains were headed in.

Back East things weren’t so clear. As early as 1785 the excesses of the Industrial Revolution had led Thomas Jefferson to plead, “Let our workshops stay in Europe.” During Jefferson’s second term as President, as the factory system he had feared was gaining a foothold in America, a young Army lieutenant named Zebulon Pike set out to explore the country’s largely unknown interior. He predicted that the region would “become in time equally celebrated as the sandy desarts of Africa.” A dozen years later Maj. Stephen H. Long, on a similar mission, wrote that the area between the Missouri River and the Rockies was “destined by the barenness of its soil, the inhospitable character of its climate, and by other physical disadvantages, to be the abode of perpetual desolation.”

By mid-century American industry had advanced to the point that workers went on strike more than four hundred times in 1853 and 1854. During the latter year Nebraska officially became a territory. It stretched all the way from the present Kansas line up to Canada and had an “official” (i.e., white) population of 2,732—mostly trappers, traders, and missionaries, many of whom did not actually live in the state. Omaha, the biggest settlement, was a shantytown of perhaps a hundred residents, alternately mired in mud and choked with dust. Then along came progress. Stagecoaches! Pony express! Telegraph! Railroads! Barbed wire! Kerosene lamps! Corn planters!

In 1883 Pittsburgh’s factory smoke was already thick enough to block out the afternoon sun. That same year Willa Gather and her family went West from Virginia to Nebraska. There they found a hardy band of dirt farmers, early settlers who stayed behind after grasshoppers had eaten out their crops year after year and harsh winters had killed off their cattle. With a few draft animals, a lot of ingenuity, and endless toil, they scratched out a meager subsistence in tiny, isolated prairie towns. Then came steam threshers! Telephones! Windmills! Bicycles! Cream separators! Washing machines! Gasoline engines!

In 1903 trusts and monopolies were choking the life out of America’s economy, and conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking plants were horrific enough that they would soon inspire Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel The Jungle . In December of that year, on a small farm nine miles south of Minden, Helga Warp—like her husband, John, a Norwegian immigrant—gave birth to her twelfth child, a boy named Harold. It was a life filled with cyclones, prairie dogs, dirt roads, and ever-present chores. As Harold later wrote, “Our world ended a mile north of our homestead, where the wagon trail led over the hill on the wide, grass-covered section line.… we seemed to see everything that came over that north hill as if it was arriving from another world.” Then came automobiles! Electricity! Indoor plumbing! Center-pivot irrigation! Airplanes! Radio! Television!

When the first pioneers arrived, some went crazy just from the isolation, even if they could manage to grow enough to feed their families. By 1890 there were a million Nebraskans, riding harvesters bigger than the sod houses they lived in. Today the state pours out grain to feed a whole nation. When the first territorial governor came out from South Carolina, it took him four weeks by carriage, train, stagecoach, steamboat, and wagon. After the railroad came through, the same trip took a couple of days. Now you can fly from the East Coast to Lincoln in three hours—or could, if it weren’t for the layover at O’Hare. That’s progress, son.

It’s progress, and Harold Warp has seen quite a bit of it—even made some himself. All great museums express the spirit of their founders, and Pioneer Village does so more than most, for Mr. Warp not only collected artifacts from all these areas of tech- nology but oversaw the design of the place and wrote the signs and captions. To this day he retains a keen interest in his museum even from his winter home in Florida (he is now ninety years old). To appreciate Pioneer Village, then, you have to know about Harold Warp and the world he came from.

“Plastics.”

— The Graduate (1967)

When William Daniels gave Dustin Hoffman that single word of career advice, it summarized everything that was gaudy and fake about suburban life in the 1960s. By that time the word plastic had become a catchall condemnation of the cheap, synthetic, disposable aspects of America. To Midwestern farmers in the 1920s, however, plastics meant something quite different: money in the bank.

It all started with chickens. Around the turn of the century farmers knew that young chicks would die, and hens would lay fewer eggs, if they were not periodically let out of their sheds into the fresh air and soil. Doing so was a nuisance, and in cold weather it could be dangerous to their health. Yet keeping them in their sheds led to frail chicks and poorly producing hens. The culprit, not understood at the time, was window glass, which absorbed ultraviolet rays from the sun that are essential to chickens’ health.

Harold Warp was not yet a teenager when he noticed that using flour-sack cloth instead of glass for windows led to healthier chickens. Unfortunately it also let in moisture and cold air. To get the best of both worlds, he saturated the cloth with wax. Over the following years, while attending high school and working in a printshop to support himself (both his parents were dead by 1915), he developed an improved window material: cloth treated with talc and then saturated with a wax-stearate mixture. If the wax and stéarate were cooked long enough, they would form a tough, translucent compound that was flexible and weatherresistant. As with many important inventions, the key step came by accident. Warp was cooking up a batch, decided to quit for the night, and left it on the stove. When he returned the next morning, it had congealed, and when he tested it by dipping in some cloth, the result was a striking improvement.

Right away it’s clear that Harold Warp has qualities lacking in the average person. Do most farmboys with a high school education spend their spare time brewing plastics in the garage? “Well, like all kids, I guess, I used to fool around with polymer chemistry, and it seemed like there was always a vat or two of ethylene dichloride around the place, so one day I…” No, this type of engineering research is not a part of most people’s childhood.

After discovering his formula, Warp did something that may have been even more difficult: he made a commercial success of it. At the age of twenty he drove to a lawyer in Omaha, applied for a patent, and registered the name Flex-O-Glass as a trademark. He brought eight hundred dollars in loans and savings to Chicago, rented a factory, took out some ads, and began manufacturing his window material with improvised apparatus powered by a Ford Model T crank that he turned himself. He and his brothers Ed and John ran the machinery, filled orders, and kept the books by day; at night they took down a mattress from the factory wall and went to sleep.

Sales were slow at first. Farmers did not know what to make of the new product; an equipment directory would only list it under “Glass,” since “Window Glass Substitutes”—let alone “Plastics”—was an unknown category. Harold Warp doggedly promoted his product, slowly building a network of dealers. He bought an airplane to make sales calls with, sparking a lifelong interest in aviation, and sponsored the Flex-O-Glass Barn Dance radio program. Researchers, including the famed physicist Albert Michelson, measured Flex-O-Glass’s ultraviolet transmissivity and found it much better than that of glass, giving scientific backing to the observations of thousands of farmers.

In 1946 Warp replaced his original translucent Flex-O-Glass with an improved product, Crystal Clear Flex-OGlass. Its list of ingredients—”acraloid, vinyl chloride, trichrysol phosphate, and dibutyl phthylate, cut in solvents of ketone and acetone,” according to a museum guidebook—showed how far Harold Warp had come from his waxstearate days. Along the way, the company developed other plastic products, mostly sheets, screens, and films: Window-Tex, Flex-0-Film, Coverall, Plasti-Pane, Jiffy-Wrap, and many more. The plastics field quickly became crowded with competitors, but Harold Warp knew a thing or two about being a pioneer, and in time he turned into a very wealthy man.

A few of his plastics were not so successful. During the 1930s, for example, many farmers decided to start removing the hulls of oats before feed- ing them to their chickens. Soon after, they noticed an increase in cannibalism among chicks. One chick would peck its neighbor, and at the sieht of blood, the entire henhouse would erupt into a cannibalistic frenzy. Warp got on the case and came up with a simple solution: Red Vi-O-Tex, a tinted window plastic that made blood invisible. In 1940, however, researchers learned that the cannibalistic chicks were deficient in furfural, an important nutrient found in oat hulls, and were trying to obtain it from each other’s tissues. Farmers came up with a simpler solution: They stopped hulling their oats.

Through all his success in business, Harold Warp remembered what life had been like on his family’s lonely farm south of Minden. Progress had eliminated the most onerous aspects of that life, which was good; nobody wanted to go back to hand-churned butter and horse-drawn plows. But memories and artifacts of that life were also disappearing, which was not so good; you can’t appreciate progress if you don’t know what you’ve progressed from. When Warp heard in 1948 that the one-room school he’d attended was being sold, he bought it. The experience made him realize how much of our country’s history was in danger of disappearing, and it inspired him to buy several other buildings. He assembled them all at a site in Minden, and as tends to happen, the collector’s impulse took over. The result was Pioneer Village, which opened in 1953 and has been growing ever since. (Today the complex is run by a not-for-profit foundation, and Warp spends most of his time in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.)

It seems implausible to find a collection so extensive, covering so many different areas of technology, in a small town in central Nebraska—so implausible that many people have a hard time accepting it. Marvin Mangers, the museum’s manager, says that one of his biggest problems is potential visitors’ assuming it’s a third-rate amusement park. Roadside signs near Pioneer Village proclaim that it is NOT A TOURIST TRAP , and while a thoughtful motorist might reflect that tourist traps are usually put where there are tourists, driving on 1-80 for long stretches can impair one’s capacity to think analytically.

Those who do visit are confronted with a collection for which the word eclectic might have been invented. There’s antique farm machinery, of course; Pioneer Village’s collection is the world’s largest. It also claims “the world’s largest collection of early outboard motors” and “the finest collection of antique motorcycles, bicycles, snowmobiles anywhere.” There are masses of kitchen appliances, telephones, typewriters, toy cars, license plates, clocks, pens, watches (including a Ronald McDonald digital giveaway model), letter openers, soda bottles, razors, china dolls, fishing tackle, coin-operated banks, even coffee filters.

And, most of all, there are cars—some 350 of them.

I don’t drive. Oh, I have a license, earned after my third attempt at a road test that I’d do about as well on today as a linear-algebra exam. But even when I did occasionally get behind the wheel, I was so bad at it that I actually felt safer riding a New York City subway. I haven’t driven for about ten years, and for the most part I haven’t missed it. It’s hard to get to Minden without a car, though; not even the D train goes there. While planning my trip, I called Pioneer Village to ask for directions, and the woman who answered the phone started telling me what exit to take off what highway. “I don’t drive,” I explained.

Long pause. “You don’t drive?” she repeated slowly, as if I had just said I was from Mars and the first place on Earth I wanted to visit was Minden. When you tell people in Nebraska that you don’t drive, they tend to be nonplussed. I asked about train and bus service. She said I could probably find a Greyhound to take me to Kearney or Grand Island (which is what I ended up doing, and got a ride to Pioneer Village from the manager); as for trains, she had no idea.

I can’t blame her for that. A check of Amtrak’s schedule reveals that a westbound traveler through Nebraska has a choice of the Desert Wind, the Pioneer, and the California Zephyr, all of which get to Hastings (the nearest stop to Minden) at 2:45 A.M. If that’s too early in the morning, you can always stay on to McCook, which the trains make at 4:46 A.M.

It wasn’t always that way. The railroads built Nebraska; they brought in settlers, carried their mail and supplies, hauled their produce back East, and even built towns for them to live in. After the Union Pacific came through in the 1860s, ranchers and farmers fought each other, sometimes with guns, for control of land close to the tracks. Well into this century, every small-town resident knew the local train schedule by heart. Now the iron horse sneaks through furtively in the dead of night, carrying city folk between Chicago and Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Seattle.

A century and a half ago the Platte River valley was an ideal natural highway for settlers going west; some 350,000 passed through between 1841 and 1866, heading for Oregon, Utah, and California. The same was true for cargo; as the caption next to an 1857 Studebaker freight wagon in Pioneer Village notes, “In the 1860s one firm alone, Russell, Majors and Waddell, required the use of 6,000 wagons and 75,000 oxen in operating a freight company over the Oregon Trail.” Today’s railroad fulfills much the same role: taking people and goods through Nebraska on their way to somewhere else.

For “local” travel—that is, anything within a few hundred miles—modern Nebraskans favor cars and airplanes. It’s no surprise that planes became popular in the Midwest almost as soon as they were invented; all you needed to get from place to place was a smooth runway to take off and land, and in flat country even that could be dispensed with in a pinch. By the late 1920s, when most roads were still unpaved, bumpy, and filled with ruts, almost every village in the state had an airfield. Private planes remain popular today, as do their larger cousins at Nebraska’s several Air Force bases. Even so, airplanes have never been an everyday means of transportation; to reach the point where a trip of fifty or seventy-five miles became routine, it took the automobile.

On anything having to do with automobiles, especially makes and models, I’m hopeless. Still, when confronted with the Pioneer Village collection, I could understand on a visceral level the importance of what I saw; like a eunuch in a harem, I knew that someone was having fun assembling and maintaining the collection. The museum’s cars are housed in two separate areas. Some especially noteworthy ones are kept in the main building, as part of a sweeping exhibition that traces the history of transportation from covered-wagon days to the present; then out back are several huge sheds that hold the bulk of the collection. The exhibit in the main building is spotless, well lit, and temperature-controlled; items on display include an oxcart built in 1822, an 1896 Duryea, a 1903 Model A (the oldest Ford production car), the second-oldest Cadillac (a 1902 model also designed by Henry Ford), and a 1909 Stanley Steamer with knobs, levers, and dials sticking out all over, like a mad scientist’s proton disintegrator from a cheap science-fiction movie.

The vehicles are furnished with explanatory captions written, like almost all the signs in the museum, by Mr. Warp himself. A calf yoke from 1830 bears this caption: “For centuries children trained oxen calves, enjoying their company while carrying fuel for the fires and water for washing. Thus earning their own keep.” The caption to a 1901 curved-dash Oldsmobile relates this sorry tale: “When Bryan was campaigning for president of the United States this Olds was used to meet him at the Milligan, Nebraska depot, with Mr. Soukup, former owner at the tiller. When Soukup got halfway up town with Mr. Bryan proudly sitting beside him in this 1901 Oldsmobile, the darned thing stopped. Bryan continued his trip to the speakine platform on foot.”

Even to a confirmed nonmotorist, antique cars are irresistible. You can look at a tractor or a refrigerator or an engine or a reaper without wanting to use it, but every old car seems to demand, “Drive me.” Maybe they had to be cranked to start, and they had no heat or air conditioning (and sometimes no windshield, doors, or windows), and you were lucky to complete a trip without a flat tire, but none of that matters to the imagination. When you fantasize about winning the lottery, you don’t worry about how you’ll pay the taxes.

The transportation exhibit follows a straightforward chronological approach (“Arranged in Respective Order of Development To Show Visually The History Of Our Country,” as a brochure puts it), and this down-to-earth practicality pervades the entire museum. Amid items some of which would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace, the bathrooms have signs asking visitors to turn out the lights when they leave. A wing containing a miscellaneous assortment of art is introduced with a placard reading: “Man First Fights For Food—Then For Rights —Then For Power. When these Needs are Fulfilled He then seeks Culture and Art. If he tires of Realistic Art He then seeks the Surrealistic. THIS ROOM IS DEVOTED TO REALISTIC TOOLS & OBJECTS OF ART .” (What a surrealistic tool might be is not explained.)

Outside the main building things get even more basic. Arranged in a semicircle is a group of preserved and restored buildings from Nebraska’s history: a general store, a land office, a church, the Warp family’s horse barn (about which the site map notes, “Harold Warp’s parents were good Christians, so the hayloft boards were laid rough side up, so young folks couldn’t have barn dances”), and an authentic sod house, to whose naturally cool interior museum staffers sometimes repair on hot summer days (though as Monica Miller of the museum’s staff notes, in original soddies rattlesnakes living in the walls were often a problem).

Also present is the one-room schoolhouse that got the whole place started. The schoolhouse is preserved as it was at its closing in 1938, complete with coal stove, period textbooks, and even Harold Warp’s perfect-attendance pin. It’s appropriate that a schoolhouse should have led to the founding of Pioneer Village, because when pioneers were laying out their towns in the nineteenth century, the first two things they set aside plots for were a church and a school. As recently as the late 1970s, Nebraska had more school districts than any other state, regardless of population.

At all the structures at Pioneer Village except the main building, visitors simply walk in, turn on the lights, look around at their leisure, and walk out, turning off the lights as they leave. In the summertime Pioneer Village gets a fair number of visitors, but during the off-season you can spend half an hour examining the fixtures of an 1860 ponyexpress station or an 187Os railroad depot in perfect solitude.

Harold Warp remains a country boy at heart, and it shows in his museum. Next to a display of hog-slaughtering apparatus is a detailed, bloody description of the process that explains how the jugular vein was split, entrails were removed, and so forth, and then concludes: “Modern refrigeration of the twentieth century has changed all this. Our children will probably never know the excitement of ‘butchering day.’” Less luridly, a romantic drawing of a couple seated in a buggy declares, “No one has invented anything better than a horse and buggy for courting.”

Scholars today debate the effects of domestic technology on women’s lives and question whether “laborsaving” devices really do save labor. Young Harold Warp saw his mother cooking, cleaning, mending, churning, preserving, and doing a thousand other chores, virtually without cease, until the day she died. It’s no surprise, then, to see a sign in foot-high letters confidently declaring HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES LESSENED WOMEN’S WORK . (A pamphlet goes further: “Few women can avoid feeling smug as they contrast their modern convenience with old-time washing machines, refrigerators, bathtubs.…” Substitute “thankful” for “smug” and “people” for “women,” and after looking at a few of the ribbed washboards and hand-pumped vacuum cleaners, it would be hard to disagree.)

The sheer numbers of things I on display at Pioneer ViII läge are heroic: five dozen -JL washing machines, seventy-eight John Rogers sculpture groups, a hundred irons, four thousand souvenir pens and pencils. The daunting profusion of objects—sewing machine after sewing machine standing at attention like a company of soldiers, antique cars lined up like a shoppingmall parking lot out of a time machine—makes it easy to forget how bare the region once was and with what joy each new item was received. Peddlers used to visit the Warp house and leave behind gadgets for Harold’s mother to pay for if she decided to keep them. “It seemed that every time someone left something at our house to try out he never came to get it again,” he writes. Like mother, like son.

In some parts of the museum this multiplicity of objects is the most impressive part, showing all the human effort that went into improving, say, a twine binder or horse cart. Elsewhere rarity is the key. Pioneer Village has the oldest intact steam-driven carousel (on which rides are available for five cents in the summertime), the second P-59 jet airplane ever built, the 1922 GE supercharger that allowed a piston-engine plane to climb to 20,000 feet, an Army helicopter built by Sikorsky that was forced down in a rainstorm in March 1944, the last surviving Buick stationary engine, and the last surviving windmill from a Union Pacific Railroad watering station.

With all the exhibits at Pioneer Village, attempts at providing context or interpretation are rare. Mr. Warp’s idiosyncratic captions sometimes just name and date the artifacts, sometimes tell stories about them from his youth, sometimes explain what they replaced or were replaced by. The people who lived on the Great Plains for thousands of years are mentioned only in passing, as when one sign explains that among the earliest settlers “oxen were preferred to horses for they did not attract the Indians.”

Another sign, accompanying a Winchester carbine of the type used by the Sioux at the Little Bighorn, notes, “Incidentally the Black Hills belonged to the Indians, by treaty, and they were fighting to protect what they rightfully owned.” The firearms exhibit of which that carbine is a part ends in rather jarring fashion. A glass case is filled with artifacts from spears and crossbows to matchlocks and muskets to a 1920 Remington automatic; at the far right is a small card that reads: “ ATOM BOMB, 1945 . Power beyond comprehension,” above a caption describing nuclear fission as “the latest development in explosives.”

Certainly the progress that Pioneer Village celebrates was not uniformly positive, and Mr. Warp is the first to admit it. For example, one caption for an unsafe automobile blandly notes that a Flex-O-Glass employee lost his life in the same model of car when hit by a drunk driver. Still, there is little attempt to balance costs and benefits. The emphasis is on what’s gone right with the world, and while it’s understood that not everyone shared uniformly in the benefits, such considerations are beyond the scope of what Harold Warp is trying to do. It might be possible to portray comprehensively all aspects of the interaction between technology and society (or at least some small portion of each) in one place, but that would be a different museum. Pioneer Village is about things—item after item, row after row, building after building. Pioneer Village takes progress and says, “Here it is. Make of it what you will.”

Nowhere is this approach more evident than in the half-dozen huge sheds, back behind the circle of pioneer buildings, that are filled with cars, trucks, bicycles, snowmobiles, tractors, and farm machinery. They range up to 265 feet in length, with two levels of vehicles and apparatus lined up on either side of a long, straight walkway. The space is kept clean, but the artifacts have clearly not been prettified for display. While some of the cars are immaculate, others have rusty trim, mud-spattered fenders, scratched and chipped paint, or even cracked windshields; tractors show the effects of decades of hard use.

The setting is Spartan: concrete floors and metal guardrails, direct overhead lights, no heat or air conditioning. There are a few introductory placards but no photomontages or videos, no little rooms on the side to break up the space, no sound effects or eye-catching displays—just a great big shed filled with machines. This lack of buttons to push may disappoint the Nintendo-raised segment of today’s youth, but anyone touring the place with a long-time Plains resident will be rewarded with a series of “I remember”s far more rewarding than any interactive computer.

The harvesters, threshers, and combines are all huge; they make a visitor not accustomed to such things feel like a three-year-old underneath the dining-room table. Specialized devices abound (sugar beet harvester, treestump puller, corn-ear chopper), as do items with common-sounding but unfamiliar names (lister, tedder). A steam threshing rig has a warning painted on: LOOK OUT OR I WILL GET YOUR FORK (that is, make sure your pitchfork does not get caught in the machinery). Unmistakable as the message is, it’s doubtful whether it would pass muster with a modern product-liability lawyer.

The automobile collection takes up three of these sheds, and there the simplicity of Pioneer Village’s presentation has its greatest impact. The cars in the museum’s main building are special favorites—polished, coddled, each one meant to be lingered over. In the sheds out back, the collective impact is what counts. Cars of several dozen makes—the familiar Oldsmobile and Plymouth, the fondly remembered DeSoto and Nash, the obscure All State and Whippet, and even one called Rockne (named after the famed Notre Dame football coach)—all follow the same design evolution. They start out looking like the carriages they descended from; over the course of the 1930s and 1940s wheel wells merge into the hoods, which then all get nose jobs. Through the 1950s trim and decorations proliferate and tail fins rise and fall; even the failures from that era have a sort of a goofy charm, such as the poor, doomed Edsel or the Ford Skyliner, with its retractable hardtop that looks like a miniature version of the Toronto Skydome. Then, as the 1960s wear on, the cars all suddenly take on the profile of a bar of Ivory soap.

Today the descendants of those automobiles threaten to unmake the Nebraska that railroads created. When the trains came through, company officials set up towns ten miles apart so a man with a team could drive to town and back in a day. In an era when seventy-five miles is an hour’s drive, that spacing looks mighty arbitrary, and many towns are in danger of withering away. Small-town life lhas always been the halllmark of pioneer land; each community had its main street, its church, its school. iut now huge malls attract shoppers from all over; church attendance continues its decadesllong decline; and the state is talking seriouslly about consolidating school districts. Will [Nebraska’s way of life become a victim of its lown success?

My father’s from Nebraska. Born in North Platte, lived in Stapleton as a little boy, then moved to Lincoln, then Omaha. Dad’s class from Omaha Technical High School held a reunion a while back. They published the usual booklet filled with old yearbook photos and information on what the graduates were up to, along with notices about those who had died. The last page has pictures of Omaha landmarks from the old days that are no longer around: “WOW Building at 14th & Farnam was dynamited Dec., 1977 to make room for new office buildings. And that’s progress!” “Tech was closed May, 1984. And that’s progress!” Two hotels and a streetcar line are memorialized in similar fashion. And at the center of the page, in large type: “Omaha and the graduates Claim to Fame: ‘Nothing Stays the Same.’ And that’s progress!”

At Pioneer Village there’s a set of big ornamental gates decorated with carvings of Indians, buffalo, and settlers that was installed at Columbus, Nebraska, in 1940 as part of a WPA project. The accompanying sign says: “To the chagrin of some Columbus history and art buffs, the city lost them in 1962—to progress. They were removed for highway widening.”

That’s what progress is, and what it has been since the Plains were called the Great American Desert: Widen that highway, expand that farm, build that town. The process can sometimes be bittersweet, but there it is, and you might as well make the best of it. When settlers found no trees to build houses from, they used sod; when there wasn’t enough rain, they put up windmills and pumped water from the ground; when bitter cold destroyed their crops and their livestock, they gritted their teeth and started over. Using whatever was available, they built and rebuilt and expanded and improved. Some of the old ways may have gotten lost in the shuffle, but whatever replaced them was probably much better, and in any case it had to happen. Newer, bigger, faster, stronger—that’s progress.

Nowadays things don’t seem so simple. Scientists say the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies Nebraska’s groundwater, is being depleted. In a few decades, should worse come to worst, there may be nothing left to grow crops with. Irrigation aside, family farms, long the mainstay of Nebraska’s economy, are having trouble competing with big agribusiness in today’s economic conditions. Even the end of the Cold War holds a potential threat to the state’s defense installations.

If you think Nebraska is in trouble because of all this, you don’t know Nebraskans. As it has always done—in pioneer days, through Dust Bowl and Depression, amid troubles and disasters both natural and man-made—Nebraska will find a way to survive. If an economy based on corn, wheat, and livestock cannot be sustained, there are lots of other options. Farmers may adopt water-conservation measures or switch to less thirsty crops, as they did during the big drought of a century ago, or genetic engineers may develop low-moisture variants. Some people suggest returning the Plains to the buffalo and the sandhill cranes or putting up huge fields of windmills or solarenergy panels. As the nation’s economy shifts to services and as communications networks expand, Nebraska’s famously industrious workers should become ever more desirable. Then there’s manufacturing, insurance … the list of possibilities goes on. Lots of ways exist to secure Nebraska’s future; the only problem is deciding which ones are best.

And there, in the end, is where Pioneer Village’s greatest significance lies. A century ago people on the Plains took the word progress literally: it meant moving forward. Everyone knew which direction forward was; the only question was how to get there. Nowadays it’s not at all clear where we’re going, in Nebraska or anywhere else. Pioneer Village documents an age when progress was something almost tangible, something you could see around you with each year’s harvest, every taller building or bigger reaper or faster car. To future visitors at Pioneer Village, that notion may one day look as antique, and as deceptively attractive, as the shiny Model T’s that they see on display.