Those North Country youths were specialists in being generalists

The New Hampshire Farm Museum on White Mountain Highway (New Hampshire Route 125), in Milton.Three centuries of Granite State rural life, and ingenuity, are presented  at the museum, whose center is an historic farmhouse. The museum includ…

The New Hampshire Farm Museum on White Mountain Highway (New Hampshire Route 125), in Milton.

Three centuries of Granite State rural life, and ingenuity, are presented  at the museum, whose center is an historic farmhouse. The museum includes a 104-foot-long,  three-story great barn with collections of agricultural machinery, farm tools, sleighs and wagons. There are also live farm animals, a nature trail and a museum shop.

The museum is  on the former Plumer-Jones Farm, with  a typically  New England series of connected buildings. The farmhouse's oldest part dates to the late 18th Century and  the barns to the mid 19th Century.

"A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.''

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)