My Own Personal Daggett Farm House and Farris Windmill

One of my most favorite houses inside the open-air museum of Greenfield Village is the Daggett Farnhouse.
What's a Daggett Farmhouse you ask?
Why, THIS is a Daggett Farmhouse:
 
It is a structure built around 1750 in the popular-at-the-time saltbox-style. It was painstakingly dismantled from its original location in Connecticut and relocated to the historic Greenfield Village open air museum in Dearborn, Michigan in 1977, opening to the public by the following year.
There are now presenters who work here while wearing 1760's period farm clothing. They cook and do chores from the colonial era to give a wonderful impression of what life was originally like in this home during that early time in our country's history.

Right next to the Daggett house is the Cape Cod Farris Windmill, built in 1633.

 
 This windmill, once the oldest windmill on Cape Cod, stood at the road to West Yarmouth, Massachusetts. It now stands at the southeast end of Greenfield Village, next to the Daggett house, a gift to Henry Ford from his Ford dealership employees nationwide in 1936.

A friend of mine and his fiance were at a local collectables store recently and made sure they stopped by to tell me that they had seen a lighted ceramic Dept. 56 Daggett-style house for sale there. Of course, I went to the place myself to see it.
Yep - there it was! And it was beautiful. In fact, there were four of these houses sitting on the shelf, but they were considered used  (they're out of print from maker Dept. 56) and had no box or packaging of any kind.
Unfortunately, they were also rather pricey, so I had to pass on purchasing one.
I thought about how cool the lighted house looked every-so-often. I really wanted to get it, but money was tight.
However, after some time (and some money I acquired by selling a few books I didn't want), I decided to see what I could find on Ebay.
Voila!
There it was! It was listed under the title "Home Sweet Home."
And guess what? With it, in the same box, was a windmill. A windmill that looked suspiciously like the Farris Windmill.
It wasn't being sold that way at the store - - - hmmm...something's amiss here...
No matter, the price for both - the house and the windmill - in the original packaging was less than half the price of just the house itself from that collectables store.
I bought it off Ebay. (That collectables store I went to was kind of a rip off, wouldn't you say? In more ways than one.)

It took only a few days til my package arrived - and here they are together:

I put some of my Colonial Williamsburg figurines around it to give it a more "3-dimensional" look - to sort of bring it too life.

And this is how the two structures look together as they sit inside Greenfield Village:


Compare the two photos - - - - pretty cool, huh?

These two Dept. 56 ceramics were introduced in 1988 and were discontinued in 1991.
The original Daggett House was reconstructed in Greenfield Village in 1977 and opened to the public in 1978, while the Farris Cape Cod Windmill was reconstructed in the Village in 1936.
They are v-e-r-y close in comparison, especially considering they came in the same box.
It's almost as if...hmmm...do you think...? Dept. 56's website says that the house is "Inspired by the East Hampton, NY historic landmark home of John Howard Payne, composer of 'Home Sweet Home'."
Is there a windmill near his house?
Let's look and see:

The home of John Howard Payne

Wow! Now this is really pretty awesome!

So now I have my own personal corner of Greenfield Village as well as the landmark historical home of the "Home Sweet Home" composer John Howard Payne on my shelf.
I think it's kinda neat.

To read more about related topics, please click the following links:
Daggett Farmhouse
Farris Windmill
Greenfield Village
Dept. 56 Colonial Williamsburg Collection











.