19th Century Farms

In researching tools for the 19th century I came across two websites that I found very helpful.

The first is the Dalziel Barn, a Pennsylvania style barn in Ontario, Canada. Their website is chock full of interesting data on life for early and mid 19th century farms, architecture, tools and life.

The second is Bushong Farm,  a 19th century farm near New Market, VA that figured prominently in the Battle of New Market. The farm is now a museum. It would be a perfect prototype farm  for ACW model railroaders to simulate.

Many years ago I visited this farm and then built a 1/250 scale model of the main farm house for use in 10mm (1:160) scale war gaming. I tended to selectively compress  my war gaming model structures by making them in a smaller scale than the figure scale. This was due to the ground scale being much smaller, typically 1:900, than the figure scale, which was 1:160. If the farm house was built to 1:160 scale it would be about the size of a foot ball field on the gaming table.

I had always wanted to try some figure wargaming where the ground scale was the same as the figure scale. Once I did build a small european town in 1:700 scale and scratchbuilt some 1:700 scale armor vehicles to try some WWII gaming, but never did complete the project. I still have the kits from this and may go back to it a some point.