Coopersville's barn full of John Deeres

The centerpiece of the Coopersville Farm Museum is one man’s lifelong habit: Ed Hanenburg’s collection of John Deere tractors, the green-and-yellow machines that did the heavy work on west Michigan farms for generations. They sit polished and proud in a 12,000-square-foot hall on Main Street, surrounded by the smaller tools and odd contraptions that filled a working farm before everything plugged in.

The museum opened its building in 2001 in a town that has every reason to keep farming close. Coopersville sits in the orchard-and-field country west of Grand Rapids, where blueberries and U-pick farms still set the rhythm of the year. Rather than let that heritage fade into nostalgia, the place turned it into something you can walk through. The exhibits frame rural life as “Then & Now” — how a chore was done with horses and hand tools, and how it’s done today — and rotate in quilts, farm art, a kids’ area, and collections lent by local families.

The living part is out front. Every Wednesday from May through October, the museum hosts a farmers market, so the same building that preserves old tractors also sells this week’s tomatoes and sweet corn — past and present farming sharing a parking lot. The hall doubles as an event center, which means a wedding reception might be held among the threshers and plows.

It’s a particular kind of museum, one a farm town builds for itself rather than for tourists passing through. The collections come from neighbors, the market feeds neighbors, and the whole thing runs on the assumption that the work those green tractors did is worth remembering by the people whose grandparents did it.

Stand among the Deeres and you can almost hear them idling in a field at dawn, back when that sound meant the day had started.