Museum Talk
Many items at the Buffalo Island Museum in Monette are over one hundred years old. One item is a cast iron Reading 78 Apple Parer made by the Reading Hardware Co. of Reading, Penn., in 1878. It was donated to the museum by the Steele family. You put an apple on the holding fork, turn the crank and the apple is peeled and automatically pushed off the fork. There was a type of apple peeler patented as early as 1803 in America, but it was in 1864 that Davis Goodell invented a more efficient apple peeler. He called it "the lightning apple parer". There were soon many different apple peelers being manufactured. An apple peeler was the first of Eli Whitney's inventions. Those first apple peelers or parers were made of wood and had a shaft with a crank on one end and a wooden fork to hold the apple on the other end.