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LAGRANGE — From the outside it doesn’t look like anything other than an old house. The wood is so old it won’t hold paint, and behind it there are clothes visible hanging from the line.
Go inside and you find rooms filled with articles that recall former LaGrange County residents, from pump organs to a wedding dress, from school excuses to china, from Civil War memorabilia to an 18th-century Bible in German.
And — oh, yes, there’s the mastodon skull.
The site is the Machan House Museum, tucked away on a side street just off of U.S. 20 and within sight of S.R. 9. Tours there are by appointment only. Leading the tour on this warm October Wednesday was Ezra S. Miller, LaGrange County historian and president of the LaGrange County Historical Society.
On first sight, the setting looks more like a neighborhood than a museum. There’s laundry, including modern T-shirts, hanging from the line out back.
“The neighbors hang their laundry there,” Miller explains. They mow the lawn, and the historical society lets them use the clotheslines out back. Behind the yard is a parking area, he says
The first indication that the house is more than a house comes from a pair of small signs hanging from the front porch roof. “Machan House Museum” says the one on top. The lower sign reads, “LaGrange County Historical Society.”
Miller apologizes for the clutter on entering. “We just brought a lot of things over from the log cabin at the fairgrounds, and we haven’t got it all organized yet,” he said.
On entering the parlor, one sees the piano that Inez (Sitter) Machan used to teach piano lessons in the house for many years. She left the home to the historical society, Miller says, and many who visit say they can just see her sitting there, recalling when she gave them lessons.
The room with the piano also features a pump organ donated by the Strawser family of Wolcottville that had belonged to an ancestor of theirs, and a wedding dress from the 19th century — still intact, as are the homemade stockings and the shoes that were worn with it. Photos and descriptions of donors abound.
In the next room is another pump organ donated by John Davis of Valentine, whose ancestor turns out to be a sister of the Strawser’s ancestor.
There are also many, many books, some antiques and some of which are for sale. To the side is a room with various books and court records dating back to the 18th century, including a German-language Bible with fancy script appropriate to the time.
Miller excitedly leafs through a book, finding the references to his ancestors. He’s descended from the first Amish child born in Indiana, who was born in LaGrange County. He also points out his wife’s ancestor’s name, listed on the facing page of his own.
The kitchen is set up much as it was in Machan’s day, with some of her own china on display in the built-in china cupboard. Upstairs is a room devoted to Civil War memorabilia of LaGrange County residents, and even the basement holds more items.
On the main floor is a school cabinet that includes a stack of excuse slips for children from long ago. One semi-literate man, trying to explain that his child had a head cold, had written “sick in head” on the school excuse slip, Miller said.
In the midst of all this, there’s the mastodon skull. It sits off to one side
It’s a genuine article, unearthed in the 19th century in LaGrange County during ditching operations, according to “From Mastodons to Mongoquinong: The LaGrange County Survey,” by Mark R. Schurr, written for Indiana University.
This particular mastodon’s fate isn’t known, but its kind were apparently a food source for prehistoric residents of what is now LaGrange County, according to Schurr. Evidence points to the Clovis people, some of the earliest known humans in the United Sates, living in the area.
“The presence of Clovis points and other Late Paleoindian artifacts in collections from the county indicate the first human occupants of the county may have been contemporary with the last of the mastodons in the area,” Schurr said. Mastodons went extinct around 11,000 B.C.
The last Native American residents of LaGrange County were the Potawatomi, whose largest community was Mongoquinong near present-day Howe, Schurr said.
All too soon, time moves forward, and it’s time to leave the museum and its trips to the past, returning to the present.
For those wanting to know more about LaGrange County history or genealogy, the museum is a place where hours could be spent. For information or to arrange a visit, call Miller at 593-2593 or 350-0606 or Sandy or Robert Yoder at 367-2346.
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