Carroll collected tools from 1978-1998, with the help of a network of friends.

Carroll Abbey, born in 1911, watched and lived through a changing world. During his childhood and youth, the family farm had been run with horse power. While the Abbeys were some of the first farmers in the area to acquire tractor power, Carroll was always attentive to the skill of the workman and ingenuity of the tools of the previous era.

Carroll Abbey spent the last 20 years of his retirement pulling these tools out of old sheds and fence rows before they were lost forever. In his quest he gathered a collection of over 4000 artifacts that illustrate innovations over time and how they were an integral part of our rural economic development and agricultural life.

Left to the Kalamazoo Foundation at Carroll Abbey's death 1998, the collection is encompassed in about 18,000 sq ft in two buildings south east of Kalamazoo Michigan.

The guiding principle in Carroll's 20 years of collecting is his "Farm Tools Introspective." His collection was very much a museum of the human spirit at work. Recognizing that a good collection is greater than the sum of its parts, he strove to find each piece that interconnected rural activities.

A Farmer's Collection of Draft Animal Era Tools
By Dick Roosenberg

Carroll Abbey, a farmer who never lived more than a mile from his place of birth, had the historical vision to assemble a powerful collection of early farm tools. Carroll was born in 1911 and retired from farming in 1978 with an amazing depth of information about early farming techniques. Carroll, his wife Ruth, and his brother George were partners on the Abbey Farms east of Kalamazoo. With the support of his brother and wife, Carroll dedicated his twenty-year retirement to the collecting of everyday farm tools of the 19th century.

While it is not unusual for a farmer to collect old tractors or implements in his retirement, Carroll had a detailed understanding of early farming techniques, a keen appreciation for the innovative nature of earlier farmers and implement builders, and the resources to acquire and house implements. As the edge of the city of Kalamazoo pushed on the farm, sales of outlying parcels of land funded the Abbey Collection.

Carroll enjoyed finding an unknown treasure. He traveled to many farms and auctions in search of items to complement the earliest tools. A couple months after finding the planks for an old "muck" or gravel wagon, Carroll returned from an auction with a big smile on his face and bent pry bar in his hand. When asked what he found, he grinned again in his testing way and offered that the bar was 38" between the bends. Knowing that the bolsters of farm wagons were 38 inches, I started guessing but, without Carroll's help, failed to get the connection with the gravel wagon. Turns out that the bar lays across the top of the gravel box to hold the sides from bowing out, but ever ready to be pulled off and used to pry out a side or bottom plank.

As well as searching the countryside for the next piece of his puzzle, Carroll worked with a number of other people who were interested in farm history but did not have the storage resources that Carroll built. Several gentlemen--Getz, Pennel, Bergman, Miller, and others--stretched Carroll's reach from Nebraska to Pennsylvania and greatly enriched the Collection.

At one morning gathering with his brother George, Carroll noted a new insight into the importance of a collection. On PBS a collector of Chinese artifacts had explained that the value of a good collection was greater than the sum of the parts since the whole gained comparative value. I think Carroll enjoyed hearing this observation since he had intuitively followed this principle from the beginning of his work. The interrelationships challenged him. He came back from a sale on another day with an unusual excitement. He had a piece that was made of two walnut pieces mortised into a 'T' pattern with a polished point at the bottom and a metal eye and hook half way up the stem. He bought it with a bucket of junk for 50 cents. Knowing I was stumped he hinted that it went with the corn shocking horse. It took a few more tips before I realized that it was a miniature windlass for tightening corn shocks snuggly enough that deer would have a hard time knocking them over.

The genius of the Abbey Collection is its emphasis on the small innovations that built our rural economies. Interpreting that for the public will be a unique challenge since it takes the viewer beyond the familiar horses and tractors, to the details that require knowledge of the skills being practiced in order to appreciate the ingenuity of the artifacts. The Kalamazoo Community Foundation, to whom Carroll entrusted the Collection and its endowment, has given Tillers three years to answer that challenge.

The Collection has 4,000 to 5,000 artifacts in 18,000 square feet. They relate mainly to crop functions such as land clearing and logging, soil preparation, planting, weeding, harvest, and post-harvest processing. But it also includes transportation, animal care, hitching and power devices using animal power. It only includes a couple of tractors, given that Carroll was principally interested in the earlier era of animal-power.

Tillers plans to make the Collection available to more people in several steps. Carroll left us the Collection in an organized storage mode. It is not in display cases or behind barriers to protect it from the public or the public from it. First, we are continuing to show the Collection to students of Tillers' classes in farming and rural development as well as by appointment to groups who appreciate agriculture and the nature of its tools. We enjoy showing small groups of farmers through since we generally learn a few things from the oldest and most knowledgeable of them. Second, we hope to make it a better research collection for interpreters of living historical farms and for historical re-enactors. We have patent records for the period of 1863-1912, and we are collecting other research materials to supplement them. Third, we want to arrange the tools to teach mechanical principles and progress in design for students of international rural development, both from the US and overseas. We are convinced that the innovations of our past can inspire many adaptations for those still struggling to find more productive agricultural methods. Ultimately, we will create special exhibits in separate spaces to accommodate casual visitors.

The Abbey Collection, unlike most living history farms, is not time or period specific. Indeed, the strength of the Collection is its ability to show innovation over time. The innovative nature of rural history drove Carroll's search and his curiosity. Showing the progress of specific tools over time will be a theme for our interpretation of the Collection. We find that change was continuous during the time covered by the Collection. We hope to intertwine implement development benchmarks with major innovations of their times - the Erie Canal, the railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, the automobile, and much later for most farms, the tractor.

We want to bring the innovation process to life with stories of brilliant people making courageous changes. Kalamazoo, like most rural counties, made special contributions to farm implement development. One was the invention of the combine harvester - most interesting because when invented in 1836 it was far ahead of its time. It failed to be accepted until years later because it preceded grain dryers in a humid climate and the good bearings required to support its high-speed threshing cylinder.

The past was limited, as is the present, by an interrelationship of knowledge, skills, and tools. A deficiency in any one of these stops progress until the gap is filled. We think the Abbey Collection provides an exciting opportunity for its visitors to break the limits that they face today by visualizing how past rural communities struggled to overcome challenges. Tillers' challenge is creating the exhibits to facilitate that visualization.