Museum Planned for Farmer’s Bumper Crop of Implements : History: Oxnard’s Bob Pfeiler has helped gather tools of his trade. The vast collection may have a new home soon.

His barn leaks and housing tracts are closing in on his farm. Besides, at 84, Bob Pfeiler says he’s not getting any younger.

So Pfeiler, a fourth-generation Oxnard farmer, has a sense of urgency about completing a 20-year project of rounding up old farming tools from across the county.

Now, Pfeiler hopes to find a new home--one shaped like a barn--for the collection. If all goes as planned in the next two years, it will become the Ventura County Farm Implements Museum.

Pfeiler said the museum would operate under the auspices of the Ventura County Museum of History and the Arts and will be “as big as we have money for.”

It will have to be. Pfeiler’s crew has gathered enough plows, bean planters, hay rakes, buggies, tractors, bean thrashers, canary cages, walnut dehydrators and other farm machinery to fill three private barns and then some. They’ve even collected other buildings.

“We have every horse-drawn piece of equipment ever used in Ventura County,” Pfeiler said with some pride.

The collection is a testament to the farmer’s reputation as a pack rat.

“As a rule, we never throw anything away,” Pfeiler said. “We push it in back or off into a barranca. That’s where we got a lot of that stuff, out of the barranca.”

Pfeiler was put in charge of the farm museum project by a former president of the historical museum. Current museum President Chuck Covarrubias said the farm implements museum will give youngsters a window on the county’s agricultural history.

“Young people today have no idea where milk comes from, where eggs come from. We want to paint a picture of how things worked in those days,” he said.

Said Pfeiler, “In 50 years, kids won’t have any idea of how food was grown. It’s like the old saying, ‘Food comes from the grocery store.’ ”

The workaday tools in the collection were not designed to look fancy. A farmer who steered a four-row lima bean planter across his field 50 years ago would probably have laughed to think of his tool as a museum piece.

But that bean planter says a lot about Ventura County’s history. Lima beans once were the county’s major crop and filled thousands of acres. Their legacy is well represented in the collection.

Pfeiler displays a progression of bean planters, horse-powered contraptions that plowed a furrow and placed the seeds at the proper depth. Early two-row planters gave way to the four-row planters, which lasted until someone invented an eight-row planter. Pfeiler has them all.

In his roomy barn sits a large wooden contraption with an angled bottom that is taller than two men. It overshadows everything else.

The device is a lima bean thrasher, and a small one at that. During thrashing time it would sit like an ark on a field while farmers pitched in wagonloads of fresh-picked beans.

“You wouldn’t believe it would still run,” Pfeiler said.

One museum piece is a tiny wooden house that sits in a corner of Pfeiler’s property. It has little more than a door, two windows and a round hole for the vent of a wood stove. A few strips of wallpaper still peel from the walls.

It is a bunkhouse where the hired man would sleep during the Depression. He was always a bachelor and usually a transient.

“You’d always get a man in the summer to help drive the horses and farm. They were hobos. Now we call them homeless.”

When visitors stopped to admire a tractor in another building, Pfeiler dismissed it.

“Don’t take a picture of that,” he said. “That’s from the modern era.” The tractor dates to 1955.

The best-restored implements are kept at another location in a barn owned by Pfeiler’s cousin.

It is a classic red barn, although the red paint is faded and gaps between the wooden planks let in ribbons of light. In the middle sits what Pfeiler calls his “pride and joy,” a massive drilling rig that somewhat resembles a medieval catapult.

“This drilled all the water wells in Fillmore and the Santa Paula area between 1890 to 1950,” Pfeiler said.

There is also a tractor, a hay rake and a grain drill, but one piece in particular stands out. It’s a horse-drawn buggy that has been handsomely restored by Dick Miller of Thousand Oaks. The padded upholstery and most of the wooden surfaces are black. The spokes and hubs of the wheels and the springs are dark red.

It isn’t exactly a farm implement, but it has special significance to Pfeiler.

“This is the buggy I went to school in,” he said. He shared a ride with his older brother and sister while most of his classmates walked.

“The rest of the kids had to walk in the rain. Well, hell, we rode to school!”

Pfeiler said his parents paid about $50 for the buggy, which they ordered from Sears, Roebuck. He used it for 10 years until he was a sophomore in high school.

“Thank God when dating time came along I graduated to a Model A coupe!” he said.

Area farmers have been generous not only with their old equipment, but with their money as well.

An endowment for the farm museum has raised $380,000, Pfeiler said. Most of that has come from farmers and other longtime county residents. The Grupe Development Co. of Thousand Oaks also contributed $100,000.

The museum will need a minimum of $500,000, but Pfeiler doesn’t expect to have a problem reaching that goal.

The museum committee is now looking for a location. Pfeiler envisions a place that is large enough to have its own field where some of the implements can be demonstrated.

The museum will denote the passing of an era, a change that Pfeiler feels only too well.

His farm, on Rose Avenue, was established by his great-grandfather in 1865. Now, Pfeiler leases out the fields to other farmers and waits for the developers to come.

“It appears that I’m the last generation to farm it. They’ve got me pegged for an elementary school right here,” he said, pointing to where he was standing outside his barn.

Like many farmers, Pfeiler has mixed feelings about progress. He said farmers have always been “land poor,” meaning that earnings from the crops are rarely more than adequate. A farm’s real value is in its land, and Pfeiler said he doesn’t blame farmers for selling out to developers for six- and seven-figure sums.

He said his own farm would have been developed by now if the economy hadn’t soured.

“You can’t help but accept progress,” Pfeiler said. “But when you’ve been born and raised right here, sure you’re a little apprehensive.”