Heritage Farm Museum's new exhibit: Modern kitchen of 1908

The staff of the Heritage Farm Museum in Sterling found plans for a 1908 Sears and Roebuck kit house on the Internet. For three years, curators have collected everything that someone visiting the kitchen of such a dwelling might have seen a century ago on a farm in Loudoun County.

On Saturday, the museum's new permanent exhibition, "In the Kitchen: Family Life on the Farm," opens. A day of activities is planned from 12 to 4 p.m., including a cookbook swap and readings from an oral history book by Loudoun Valley High School students.

There's a lot crammed into the 14-by-14-foot kitchen, which includes a back porch and door. It might seem constraining by today's McMansion standards, but farm kitchens a century ago were very small, museum officials said.

A major goal of the exhibition is to highlight the role of women on the farm at the dawn of the 20th century.

"I did a lot of research on the time period so we could construct something as authentic as possible, but fit in the space we had," said museum curator Katie Jones, 31, of Reston. "What did modernization mean for women in a rural setting in 1900? . . . The whole idea being that, by organizing properly, having the right tools in the right place, you could spend less time in the kitchen."

Domestic chores began to change dramatically with the Industrial Revolution, as new technologies and metallurgy allowed women to work faster. Convenience items most people today take for granted, such as egg beaters, potato ricers and jar openers, slowly became ubiquitous during this time.

Don't look for running water or electricity, though. A copper-lined sink with a pump would bring in water from an outdoor well (it's not operational in the museum), but there's no drain. It was called a "dry sink," or a "bucket bench." A farm wife would need to dump the water outside after she finished her washing chores.

Kids are likely to be amused, if not confused, by the ice box, where perishables would have been stored in a small compartment under a block of ice.

"The iceman was a lot like the milkman," Jones said.

Another innovation highlighted in the exhibition is an original Hoosier cabinet, donated by the Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association in Reston. There's a spice rack inside, a bin for flour with a sifter underneath, a sugar compartment that swivels out and a metal cutting board that can be pulled out from the cabinet. There's even a drawer for dishes and another for linens.

"It was considered revolutionary, because they didn't have built-in cabinets at the turn of the century," Jones said. "They were touted as a way to decrease a woman's time in the kitchen by 30 percent."

Although some technologies existed in big cities by 1910, electricity and gas and running water didn't arrive to most of Loudoun County until the 1920s and 1930s.

"You're about 10 or 20 years behind if you're living in a rural area in 1910," Jones said. "Just because something is new doesn't mean everyone will have it."

The museum has made the kitchen interactive, with a lot of items for kids to pick up and play with. Mason jars line a shelf on one corner of the milled, oak floorboards. The most historically rare material is behind plexiglass.

"I've done my best to childproof everything I can think of," Jones said. "It's like walking into a movie set, and you get to play in it."

The kitchen was added to complement the Waxpool General Store, which is on the other side of the museum's indoor space. The general store, a children's favorite, was reconstructed from an original general store and post office in the Ashburn area from 1890 to World War II.

Educational programs for schools will be designed around the new kitchen. There will be units on electrification, modernization, gender roles and cooking. Jones said she is putting the finishing touches on the displays that will go in the kitchen.

The museum, which is a joint venture between a nonprofit group and the county's Parks and Recreation Department, gets about 16,000 visitors each year. Museum admission is $5 for adults, $4 for seniors and $3 for children 2 to 12.