The Landis Valley Village & Farm House is a 100-acre living history museum located in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, built on the site of a historic rural crossroads village. It is the country’s biggest museum dedicated to early Pennsylvania German life. The Landis Valley Village & Farm Museum collects, preserves, and interprets the history and material culture of the Pennsylvania German rural community from 1740 to 1940, enhancing understanding of their successful practices, interactions with others, and impact on the state and nation. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission presently runs the museum, which was founded in 1925 by brothers Henry K. and George Landis and incorporated in 1941. Henry K. Landis and his brother George Landis, who grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in the 1870s and 1880s, began planning the Landis Valley Village & Farm Museum in the early 1920s. They became active collectors of a variety of historic artifacts, including antique furniture, arrowheads, and other Native American relics, bullets, buttons, coins, Conestoga Wagons, dishes and glassware, farm equipment and tools, fossils, Fraktur, guns, pottery, and quilts, due to their shared interest in Pennsylvania history, particularly Pennsylvania German history. Following their retirement from their separate jobs as a mining and construction/sanitary engineer in 1924, the Landis brothers pooled their collections at the Landis family’s Lancaster property and, in 1925, publicly unveiled many of their acquired things to the public. They sought support from the Carl Shurz Foundation to transform their facilities and collections into an official museum as their holdings grew and its educational attraction grew in popularity. In 1941, the Landis Valley Museum was formed, and a professional curator was appointed to classify and display the brothers’ collection. A farm equipment barn, gunsmith’s shop, pub, and wagon shed were also built with the help of the foundation. The aging Landis brothers deeded the museum and property to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1953, which turned it into a living history museum by reconstructing historic structures on adjacent state-owned properties to develop educational programs that would show groups of teachers and schoolchildren, families, tour groups, and other visitors firsthand how Pennsylvania Germans lived, farmed, and operated their manufacturing businesses. During the mid-1980s, museum officials began a project to conserve the integrity of heritage seeds planted and collected on Pennsylvania German homesteads and small farms before 1940. Three production plots, six showcase gardens, and two hoop houses are being utilized to conserve and replant chosen seeds from year to year as of 2019, guaranteeing that these vegetable and other plant strains remain free of the effects of contemporary hybridization. The museum also keeps records of where each seed came from, and at the museum’s Herb & Garden Faire each year, chosen types of seed are offered for sale to the general public. You can visit the museum from Thursday to Saturday 9 AM to 4 PM and Sunday 12 noon to 4 PM.

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