For the past 17 years on a ramshackle farm in Lancaster County, Pa., two aging Mennonites, Henry ("Henner") and George Landis have collected old knick-knacks from nearby farms and hamlets. Everything their thrifty neighbors had to sell, from cracked millstones to old whiskey bottles, the Landis brothers bought and stored away.
They amassed old books, rifles, farm tools, wagons, toys, wax fruit, chamber pots. They salvaged the whole floor of a barn because members of an early German-American sect had knelt on its boards to pray. When a neighboring hotel was torn down, Henner...