Pioneer Room, Rahr Civic Center, Manitowoc, WI, circa 1933

About this postcard

The Pioneer Room of the Rahr Civic Center & Public Museum in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, with the hand tools of the area's first settlers mounted for display. On the wall, left to right, hang a posthole spade, adze, wool carder, ox yoke, plane, spokeshave, and log saw; along the bottom stand a cradle scythe, flax breaker, butter churn, and harness making bench. The pieces are the ordinary working gear of clearing land, breaking flax, churning butter, and making harness, gathered into one instructive case. Pioneer rooms were a common feature of Midwestern museums in the early twentieth century, when communities assembled the tools of their first settler generation as a record of hard frontier labor. Manitowoc, a Lake Michigan port known for shipbuilding and for the Rahr family's malting business, gave the museum its name and home.