Summer Kitchen and Wash House
A summer kitchen is a small, detached kitchen used, as the name implies, for cooking in the summertime, as they allow for the preparation and cooking of food without the addition of heat into the home. While detached kitchens have a history in America going back to the 18th century, the actual term “summer kitchen” has a strong attachment to German heritage, and in fact may have its origins (like Hermann itself) in German Pennsylvania.
Historical context shows us that detached kitchens originated and gained popularity not just because of hot summers, but because of a convergence of technological and cultural shifts in the 18th and 19th centuries. At this time, houses began to adopt the cookstove, a device that took up space in a room and heated up with an efficiency and intensity that necessitated the detached summer kitchen. At the same time, foodways were diversifying thanks to access to a wide variety of plants and animals and land on which to grow and raise them. During the summer harvest and slaughter, summer kitchens were a flurry of activity: vegetables were pickled, fruits were made into preserves, meat was cooked and meals were prepared.
Along with being a convenience with shifting technologies and foodways, summer kitchens were unique as a space for women. The products that were prepared in the summer kitchen could provide directly for the family in terms of consumption, or they could be sold and traded to provide the family with monetary income or other necessary goods. While summer kitchens were not necessarily a site for women’s liberation, they were a site that reconstructed the landscape of what “women’s work” was and what it could be.
This outbuilding was constructed by the Kallmeyers during the 20th century. Joy Kallmeyer remembers this being used mainly as a wash house, and he recounted that his mother would do a lot of her work in there: washing, repairing and ironing the clothes of not just her family, but also the farmhands, of which there could be up to six at a time living and working on the farm. There were five Kallmeyer kids, so their mother was essentially doing the cooking, cleaning and caring for 12 people — her children, her husband and the hired hands. Joy recalls that every Monday was wash day.
Smoke House
This ornate iron stove is original to the smokehouse.
This smoke house was built by the Kallmeyer family after they bought the farm in the early 1900s. The Kallmeyers kept pigs on the farm, and after slaughter, much of the meat was hung in the smoke house to be preserved. Before refrigeration, perishable items like meat and milk had to be preserved in order to store it for future use, especially winter, when fresh food was scarce. Meats were smoked, salted and air-dried; milk became cheese and butter; and fresh produce was pickled and jarred. This was often called “putting up,” as the finished products were put up on shelves or down in cellars for future enjoyment.
One popular method of meat preservation was sausage making, and the culinary history of German sausage– or Wurst– runs deep. Even today, the German culinary influence on the Midwest is apparent in the regional popularity of bratwurst, braunschweiger and German-style bologna. During the time that Hermann was settled, nearly everyone in Missouri regardless of cultural heritage had some sort of sausage recipe into which their leftover bits of pork would go. What made the Germans unique was their imperative to use every part of an animal in the sausage-making process. While Americans of non-German, primarily British and Scotch-Irish, descent still made sausages, they were more likely to discard products like the liver and blood, while Germans used them for dishes like liver sausage (Leberwurst) and blood pudding (Blutwurst). The Germans were also unique in their taste for rich, spicy flavors in their sausages, as opposed to the more mild flavors popular in non-German-settled regions.
Barns
When the Kallmeyers moved to this property, this bright red barn was already here, albeit much smaller. The Kallmeyers added onto it to make it the size you see today. While Husmann and Manwaring didn’t keep many animals at their nursery business (in 1860 there were two horses, four milk cows, two oxen and one other unspecified type of cow), the Kallmeyers kept cattle, horses, mules and swine, sometimes having hundreds of animals on the farm at a time.
The mule barn, also painted a bright, cheerful red, houses our iconic pair of Missouri mules, Pat and Jane.
Cider House
Charles Teubner established an orchard on the Farm when he purchased the property. In fact, he and Josephine were married in an orchard here on the property. Apples would have been milled and pressed after harvest to make juice and cider as well as applejack.
