Word: henner
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...past 17 years on a ramshackle farm in Lancaster County, Pa., two aging Mennonites, Henry ("Henner") and George Landis have collected old knick-knacks from nearby farms and hamlets. Everything their thrifty neighbors had to sell, from cracked millstones to old whiskey bottles, the Landis brothers bought and stored away...
They amassed old books, rifles, farm tools, wagons, toys, wax fruit, chamber pots. They salvaged the whole floor of a barn because members of an early German-American sect had knelt on its boards to pray. When a neighboring hotel was torn down, Henner and George Landis bought its whole barroom. But Henner and George Landis were not antique dealers, never sold so much as a darning needle. They just collected things as a hobby...
Before long the tremendous clutter of their possessions filled half a dozen barns and spilled out all over the yard. They had to clear paths through their bedrooms to get to bed. Their kitchen became a small clearing amid dust-laden heaps of guns, bottles and spittoons. Still Henner and George Landis went on collecting...
...they were a little queer. But connoisseurs soon found that the Landis brothers' hoard contained the largest and most complete collection of Pennsylvania-Dutch arts and crafts in existence, and the Oberlaender Trust decided to build a museum on the farm where scholars and tourists might see what Henner and George had collected...