CURRENT HOURS: Tuesday-Saturday 9am-4pm (last tractor cart to farms leaves at 2:30)
Want to know more about something you saw at Living History Farms, interested in learning a new skill, or just want to have fun with friends and family? Historic Skills Classes let you work in small groups to learn a specific skill or trade that was common in centuries past. With a small class size (capped at 3–6 people), you are guaranteed individualized instruction and plenty of opportunity to participate.
Why wait until St. Patrick’s Day to enjoy Irish sweets? Make three popular Irish cookies—shortbread, soda bread, and Irish lace—and bake them in an 1870s wood oven. Enjoy them with a cup of tea as you learn more about Irish American history.
Do you have a wood-burning stove at home that you’d like to use, but don’t know how? Do you just want to try cooking the way your great-grandparents did? Roll up your sleeves and make hearty meat stew, a vegetable side dish, bread, and a cake. You’ll learn the design of the wood stove and how to properly use it. After the meal is prepared, sit down to enjoy the food and ask last-minute questions.
Cozy up to the wood stove in the 1876 Tangen Home kitchen for an evening of historic tastes and smells. Mix and knead a fast-rising yeast roll. Bake your rolls in the wood oven and churn cream into butter while you wait!
This basic wood stove cooking class will get kids and their adults busy in the kitchen preparing kid-friendly recipes and doing kitchen chores. Kids will learn how to read a recipe, measure and mix ingredients, and roll out dough the old-fashioned way. While the food cooks, they’ll wash and dry dishes and bring in wood for the wood box. After chores are done, they can sit down and enjoy the food they made.
Victorians loved doughnuts for breakfast, for tea, and for snacks. Mix and fry this favorite fall treat doughnut on top of the wood stove, roll in cinnamon and sugar, and enjoy with hot spiced cider.
Looking to explore bread baking from scratch? Would you like to try baking in a wood-burning stove? Try your hand at biscuits, muffins, yeast bread, and cinnamon rolls in the 1876 Tangen Home kitchen. Afterward, sit around the table and enjoy your creations while learning more about the house and the type of family that would have lived there.
Who says this dish is just for breakfast? Join us at the 1876 Tangen Home to mix and bake a fluffy baking powder biscuit in the wood oven. Then stir up a milk-and-sausage gravy in a cast iron skillet. Scrambled eggs on the side and a pot of coffee round out this delicious breakfast-for-supper.
Experience the atmosphere of the 1876 Tangen kitchen as you mix up two traditional Norwegian cookie recipes. Mix and bake kringla knots (figure eight shaped Norwegian cookies). While they bake, mix up and fry fattigman (a traditional Norwegian doughnut sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar). Enjoy these treats with a pot of wood stove boiled coffee.
There are sugar cookies, and then there are the buttery, crumbly Norwegian sugar cookies known ans sandbakkels. Mix and shape a sweet crust for tart pans. Chop and spice fresh apples to fill these sweet treats. Whip sweet cream for the topping while your sandbakkels bake in the wood oven. Enjoy the results with a mug of hot cider.
Enjoy the tastes and smells of cardamom, pepper, cinnamon, and cloves as you mix and bake this intense Scandinavian-style crisp gingerbread cookie in the 1870s wood stove. Discuss Norwegian Christmas holiday traditions as the cookies bake.
Hosting Sponsor of Foodways Programs:
Be a blacksmith for a day! Learn the basics of forge work while making a decorative iron project to take home. Topics will include safety, tools, equipment, and beginning techniques for shaping metal. No previous experience needed.
We’ll start with an overview of safety and then dive into your projects. You’ll make at least two of the following decorative projects for the home: candleholders, napkin rings, hooks, paper towel holder, letter opener. While doing these projects, you’ll learn and practice drawing out metal, making decorative bends and twists, and more. Previous Blacksmith Basics class or other experience recommended.
Get a workout as you forge a large camp tripod that doubles as a rotisserie or decorative plant hanger (retail value over $90)! The finished project will stand between 4 and 5 feet tall and is based on a Civil War-era design—great for camping or re-enacting. You’ll learn and practice skills that include drawing out metal, making eye bolts, and advanced forging techniques. Previous Blacksmith Basics class or other experience recommended.
Embroidery is an age-old handcraft that is seeing a modern resurgence. Learn the basics to stitch a decorative piece and discover the relaxing quality of hand-stitching. We’ll cover fiber choices and multiple basic stitches. You’ll take home a stitching to start.
Learn to begin a knitting project by casting on, do the basic knit and purl stitches, increase and decrease stitches, and read a knitting pattern. We will begin making a simple dish towel, and you will leave with your own knitting needles, yarn, and several beginner patterns!
11121 HICKMAN, URBANDALE • 515-278-5286
— THANK YOU TO OUR 2026 PREMIER PARTNERS —
Official Modern Agricultural Equipment Partner
