Schroeder Saddletree Factory Museum (Madison, Indiana)

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106 Milton Street
Madison, IN
www.historicmadisoninc.com/saddletree_museum.htm

Madison, Indiana was once a leading American manufacturer of saddletrees. Today, most people in Madison and elsewhere would be hard-pressed to say just what a saddletree is. The city’s newly restored Schroeder Saddletree Factory, unique in the nation, aims to preserve the historic Madison craft in its original setting. The only known intact nineteenth-century saddletree shop in the United States offers visitors a glimpse of a lost time in a reclaimed landmark.

The Schroeder Saddletree Factory in Madison reminded John Staicer of Pompeii. The advent of the automobile, not the explosion of a volcano, claimed the manufacturer of the wooden skeletons that go inside horse saddles. But just as in that ancient Roman city, a picture of a former time was sealed in a time capsule when the century-old factory closed its doors in 1972. Preservationists like Staicer found bandsaws, table saws, shaping and carving machines, planers and jointers sitting where they had last been used. Aprons covered in sawdust were slung over workstations. A lunch box waited by a table saw. Undisturbed for years, it was as if the workers had just left their posts and might soon return.

After complete restoration by Historic Madison, Inc., that sense of time travel remains for visitors to the factory. It is now an “operable museum of industry,” according to Staicer, director of the Schroeder Saddletree Factory Project. The three simple-looking structures that make up the site—the family residence, woodworking and assembly shop, blacksmith and sawmill—opened to the public in May. “When you walk in, it is truly as if you’ve stepped back in time,” said Staicer. “It’s a cliché, but you feel it. The building is a working landmark.”

Madison was once home to 12 of the 15 Indiana factories manufacturing hundreds of thousands of saddletrees and shipping them to saddle makers around the world. Prussian immigrant John Benedict “Ben” Schroeder opened his factory in 1878. It was family-owned and operated for nearly a century, until 1972 when Ben’s last surviving son, Joe, died. Since 1999, Historic Madison has preserved just what it found there—a unique portrait of a long-lived, family-run business.

Not only have sagging structures been repaired, making for dramatic before-and-after photographs, but much of the factory’s antiquated machinery has been put back in working order. For the education of visitors, skilled craftsmen are learning the art of saddletree-making from the artifacts themselves. “Sort of reverse engineering, learning backwards from what was left behind,” said Staicer.

The Schroeder Saddletree Factory is open 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Mondays and 1 to 4:30 p.m. most weekends. Tours begin on the hour and last 45 minutes. Admission is $3 for adults, free for children 18 and younger who are accompanied by an adult. You’ll find the landmark at 106 Milton St., Madison. For more information, contact Historic Madison, 812-265-2967 or 812-265-3426.