Celebrating 100 Years Of The Kinder Farmhouse

Inside a brick house at Kinder Farm Park, visitors can examine 1900s relics: a candlestick telephone, a hand-crank sewing machine, insulated milk boxes, an RCA Victrola record player and other items.

Volunteers from the Friends of Kinder Farm Park Historical Society have collected and preserved the donated materials to display them to the public once a month, because they love history. They plan to celebrate that history and the farmhouse’s 100th “birthday” on June 21 from 11:00am-3:00pm. A rain date is set for June 22.

With the house decked out in patriot bunting, the event will include children’s games from the 1930s in the front yard, photo opportunities with a 1930s era automobile and farm tractor, two watermelon eating contests (for ages 5-8 and 9-12), small barnyard toy gifts for children, and a birthday cake and cookies.

The event should be fun for visitors and volunteers alike.

“We’re going to be trying to get the sewing machine on the front porch so I can sit in my 1930s dress and show the kids how people used to sew without electricity,” said volunteer Janice Hendra.

The Friends of Kinder Farm Park also hope to book a German-style food truck and German musicians. The German connections fit with the history.

Kinder Farmhouse — The Early Years

The farmhouse is filled with notebooks and documents detailing the history of the building and everything inside. Framed pictures are flanked by labels explaining how the Kinder family settled on the Millersville property. Three siblings — Gustave, Ulrika and Henry — traveled to America from Germany in 1893 or 1894. In 1896, their mother, Henrietta, six other siblings and a 2-year-old granddaughter joined them in Curtis Bay.

“The Kinders had left in the mid-1890s to come here in three separate groups because the kaiser was drafting every man available and some of the sons were very young – 7, 8, 10 – when they came, but they were targets,” said Diane Rausch, co-chair of the Friends of Kinder Farm Park Historical Society.

Gustave bought about 45 acres of land in 1898, and Henry bought acreage in 1902, adding many more purchases until the 1950s. One of those purchases included the land where Henry and Hilda built the farmhouse in 1925.

The brick farmhouse originally got electricity from a generator-run battery and had running water. A basement with partial dirt floors was used for storing jars of canned goods, hanging laundry during inclement weather, and for other purposes. The Kinders reserved the first-floor bedroom for visiting guests, and the rest of the family slept in four upstairs bedrooms. They shared one bathroom upstairs. Heat was circulated through a large floor vent on each level.

“When Henry Kinder Sr. moved into this house, he had seven children and four bedrooms,” Rausch said. “They managed just fine, but I tell the kids (who visit), nobody had a bedroom by themselves and nobody had a bed by themselves.”

Henry and Hilda had one more daughter after they moved into the house. Those children worked with Henry, a truck farmer, picking produce and vegetables.

“Then he drove into Baltimore by wagon for many years, and then later in the ‘30s, they acquired a truck,” Rausch said. “But by that time, the truck farming in Baltimore was less productive financially for the farmers because so much was coming on refrigerated trains and trucks from the south, which had an earlier growing season. So, Henry and his four sons began cattle farming.”

The Next Era

The Kinder family raised eight children and nine grandchildren who lived in various houses and converted barns around the park until 1979 when they sold the property to Anne Arundel County.

“They had more than 277 acres, but they began to sell off to the developers and that’s part of the reason Kinder Farm decided to move because there was suburbia putting pressure on them,” Rausch said. “Fortunately for us, Robert Pascal, who was the Anne Arundel county executive, came here hunting one day, heard they wanted to sell the land, came back and approached them about selling this land for park land and that they would try to create a farm park.”

In 2011, volunteers decided to turn the house into a museum, an endeavor that took three years. About 30 men showed up to help on the first day.

“They were a great help because they came with many talents,” Rausch said. “We gutted walls, we tore out bathrooms, we had to paint and put up wallboard after that.”

All that hard work paid off, with the farmhouse hosting visitors for over 10 years now. The Friends of Kinder Farm Park hope to see many guests for the 100th anniversary celebration in June, an event that Rausch hopes will inspire more people to get involved as stewards of the farmhouse.

“It is history,” she said. “We’d like to see the maintenance go to another generation because we’re all over 60, some of us well over 60, and it’s just a big job. You need a big team, and the history is fascinating.”

The farmhouse is open on the second Saturday of each month from 11:00am-3:00pm.