Armbruster House
The Armbruster House depicts 1915 and was actually built in 1914 by Jacob Armbruster supposedly for his daughter or sister. The house was occupied into the 1990s and was donated to the Museum in 2001.
A mystery about the house is that although Mr. Armbruster had a lumber yard, this is an Eaton’s house, with Eaton’s stamped in the crawl space. The interior has been laid out as authentically as possible to what it would have been in the time it was built, based on anecdotal reports.
The kitchen area is very small due to a bathroom being built into the area at some point. This is now displayed as a pantry. The upstairs has some interesting historical evidence in the form of paint shadows. On the floor in the upstairs bedroom, you can see paint lines that indicate where temporary walls would have been. A possible deduction is that the room was divided for some privacy probably with girls on one side and boys on the other, with the parents in the landing area. Nonfunctioning stove.
Highlights: Beautiful couch that also folds down into a very small bed, no closets, ornate kitchen stove, Hoosier cabinet in kitchen, rotating knife sharpener.
Zeke & Mabel Tour the Armbruster House
New here? Meek Zeke and Mabel, your unofficial museum guides.
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Homes, Homesteads & the Art of Making Do
One thing Zeke and I have learned wandering the museum is this:
Prairie folks knew how to make do.
They made homes out of what they had, stretched space farther than seemed possible, and somehow found room for children, chores, visitors, stoves, boots, and supper — sometimes all in the same tiny building.
Zeke says you can learn an awful lot about a community by the size of its houses.I say you can learn even more by how many people they somehow fit inside them.
“Fair point,” he said. “Though I still maintain some of those children must’ve been stackable.
”And so, naturally, we spent part of our day peeking into the museum’s houses and cabins — each one telling a different story about the people who once lived, worked, cooked, slept, and somehow kept life moving on the prairies.
The Armbruster House (1914)
When Zeke sees a house with a porch, he naturally assumes we ought to sit on it.
“Can’t properly appreciate a house without leaning on the railing a bit,” he says.
So that’s how we ended up discussing the Armbruster House.
This tidy little home was built in 1914 by Jacob Armbruster, supposedly for either his daughter or his sister. Nobody seems completely certain which, though Zeke says family stories sometimes travel about as straight as a cow path.
The house was lived in right into the 1990s, which is pretty impressive for a place that started life over a hundred years ago. In 2001, it was donated to the museum.
Now here’s where things get interesting.
Mr. Armbruster owned a lumber yard, which means you’d expect a house he built to be made from local lumber. But when volunteers looked into the crawl space, they found Eaton’s stamps on the boards.
“That right there,” Zeke said, scratching his head, “means it came from an Eaton’s house kit.
”Which raises a fair question. If you own a lumber yard… why order your house from a catalogue?
Zeke shrugged. “Mabel, sometimes folks just like getting mail.
”Inside, the rooms are arranged the way a home around 1915 might have looked. One thing visitors notice right away is the tiny kitchen. At some point someone squeezed a bathroom into the space, so today the museum displays it as a pantry.
Upstairs, you can still see paint shadows on the floor showing where temporary walls once stood — likely a way to divide the sleeping space and give a little privacy.
“In a house this size,” I said, “privacy was less a room and more a hopeful suggestion.
”Before we left, Zeke admired the ornate kitchen stove, the Hoosier cabinet, and a clever little rotating knife sharpener… and then made a dramatic move toward the beautiful couch that folds into a tiny bed.
“Zeke Bindertwine, stop right there!” I said, grabbing his sleeve just in time. “That is a museum display, not your personal nap station!”
“But it looks so cozy,” he protested.
“If we let Zeke test every historical chair and couch,” I told him, “we’d have to list him under interactive
programming.”