Discover: Woodland’s one-of-a-kind museums
Offbeat collections include tractors, gas pumps
“We’re the best-kept secret in Woodland. Farmers get all exited when they come here.” Gregory Allen, docent, Heidrick Ag History Museum
Woodland is for folks who like their museums a little offbeat. There’s a museum full of antique tractors. There’s a museum full of biblical slingshot projectiles. There’s a museum that pays tribute to the Woodland pioneer who didn’t like being 5 feet 4 and built his mansion accordingly. And there’s a museum, most offbeat of all, that pays tribute to the gas stations and soda fountains of the 1950s, complete with a crashed airplane poking through the roof.
On a quiet day, a visitor to Woodland, the county seat of Yolo County, gets the museums all to himself. Slingshot projectiles can be a hard sell, even if they were the kind that knocked off Goliath.
The slingshot projectiles — guaranteed authentic even though not guaranteed to have been slung by David — are among the highlights of the Woodland Museum of Biblical Archaeology, a one-room collection of Bible-age artifacts collected by longtime Baptist pastor and archaeology buff Carl Morgan. It’s open by appointment only.
Morgan answers the phone on the first ring, invites you to come on down right away and holds the front door open when you arrive. Admission is free and donations are encouraged — the same arrangement as at Sunday services in Morgan’s church next door.
Inside the glass cases are oil lamps, bowls, jugs and coins of the kind that the Bible folks might have used. Many of them Morgan encourages you to pick up and hold in your hand. Most of them Morgan has borrowed from the collection from time to time and held aloft during his sermons, as visual aids. It’s one thing to say the Bible is like a lamp unto my feet and it’s another to show folks a 2,000year-old oil lamp and let them hold it. You can also hold genuine coins of the kind that got the temple moneychangers in such hot water from certain quarters.
A humble clay cup in one display was just the sort of thing that Christ would have used at the Last Supper, Morgan said, although quickly adding that there is no Holy Grail and thus no need to seek one, fellow archaeologists such as Indiana Jones notwithstanding.
No, Morgan said, the museum has no object older than from the time of Biblical creation, about 6,000 years ago. What would be the need for that, Morgan said. The whole point of a science like archaeology is to back up Bible teachings. There’s nothing wrong with science, as long as it doesn’t get in the way.
“Our purpose,” Morgan said, “is to demonstrate the authenticity of the Bible.”
After you hand back to Morgan the oil lamp of the kind Mary might have used in the manger, it’s time to bid farewell to the museum with the antique slingshot stones and head for the home of the antique tractors.
It’s the Heidrick Ag History Museum, where for $10, you can see more old tractors than have ever been assembled before under one roof. Not all of them are red. In fact, hardly any are red. There are balers, harvesters, reapers, threshers, separators and various other contraptions that revolutionized farming in a way that docent Gregory Allen would like to tell you about, at great length, especially since you may have him all to yourself.
“We’re the best-kept secret in Woodland,” Allen said. “Farmers get all exited when they come here. But we’re specialized. This is not for everyone.”
All the tractors work, Allen said. He could even get them up and running, in a jiffy, if someone would give him the OK, which no one will. It’s a darn shame to see an idle tractor, he said, and that goes for an indoor tractor, a clean tractor and a for-displayonly tractor.
“Please do not climb on tractors,” the sign near the front door reads, which is not what kids of any age want to see upon entering a tractor museum.
The tractor collection was the life’s work of Fred and Joe Heidrick, two wealthy Woodland brothers and farm owners who collected even more tractors than the museum can hold. They had to sell a whole bunch of the tractors in order to construct the museum building to display the tractors they didn’t sell. That’s how it goes with best-kept secrets so well kept that few people know they’re there.
“We don’t even make enough at the box office to keep the lights on,” Allen said.
A mile or so to the west is the Gibson House, home of the Yolo County Historical Museum. It’s an old Victorian home, built by Woodland pioneer farmer William Gibson in the mid-19th century. It could pass for a small version of the Winchester Mystery House and, at $5 a head, it’s a better deal.
The docent on duty is often a college student named Melanie, who works her entire shift in a hoop skirt, whether or not anyone shows up for a tour.
On the second-floor balcony is the ornamental safety railing that is only 2 feet high — not tall enough to prevent anyone from falling over to the ground below. Gibson deliberately built the railing 2 feet high because he himself was only 5 feet 4 and he didn’t like being 5 feet 4. When a guest arrived, Gibson would stand on the balcony behind the short railing in order to appear taller than he was. He might have had the most money in town, Melanie said, but there is only so much you can buy with it.
The Gibson House also includes a blacksmith shop, a root cellar and a room where somebody besides Mr. Gibson would turn the handle on a giant machine to churn butter. You can visit all of them except the root cellar, which is a shame because there are not a lot of root cellars around. You can also pick a pomegranate from the tree out back. At some museums, if every visitor were to pick a pomegranate, pretty soon there wouldn’t be any pomegranates left. Not at the
Gibson House. Plenty of pomegranates for all.
Woodland’s most unusual museum could be Reiff ’s Gas Station, a reconstructed 1950s-era gas station, soda fountain and movie palace facade.
Mark Reiff, a Woodland grandpa, worked at such a gas station in the 1950s and decided to decorate his home on the west side of town to look like one. He bought a whole bunch of antique gas pumps, soda pop vending machines, soda fountain equipment (including a rare five-spindle milkshake mixer) and the furnishings from an old diner in Montana. There’s even a small airplane that appears to be poking through the gas station roof, as if it just crashed, which must have done something for surrounding property values in the neighborhood, one way or the other.
Reiff ’s Gas Station is open by appointment, too. It’s important to note that when you call to see if it’s open, and Reiff says to come over, you might find he’s had to go drive a pal someplace. Come back another day, he says, and try again. That can happen in Woodland, where the museums are such treasured parts of the civic landscape that it hardly makes sense to open them for business, especially at Reiff ’s, where the antique gas pump says the gasoline costs 11 cents a gallon. On those terms, you wouldn’t stay open long.