Unlike most museums, where priceless objects sit off limits, McKinney’s Collin County Farm Museum at Myers Park and Event Center lets kids climb, touch and twiddle knobs with impunity. They get to play farmer with refurbished equipment circa the mid-19th to early 20th centuries and see how rural communities earned their bread and butter harvesting wheat, corn and cotton from the Blackland Prairie soil.

“We want our historic artifacts to work,” says museum coordinator Jennifer Rogers, and, sure enough, there’s not a “do not touch” sign within sight.

With help from volunteers, get behind the steering wheels of antiquated tractors or brush sheets of fluffy cotton with carders – wooden paddles with long metal teeth. See how the wheat binder and thresher cut and separate the wheat kernels from the stalk, and climb onto the high seat of the combine, a monster machine that did the work of three machines of a generation before. Step up inside the kitchen wagon, which was pulled out into the fields to feed the threshing crew their two biggest meals of the day using an iron stove and pot and pans.

Your kids’ fingers will itch to touch the museum’s prize 1911 Ford Model T, which amazingly still runs after more than a century. But cover your ears! The jolting sound from the car horn bounces off the building’s tin walls. Not far from the Model T stands a towering red gas pump for early gas-powered vehicles. Volunteers will show how station attendants would manually pump a lever to fill up a clear glass canister with gasoline and then release it to drain into the vehicle.

It won’t take all afternoon to see the farm museum, so spend the rest of the day exploring Myers Park. Grab a map and go on a self-guided tour of the Rural Heritage Trail, which winds through the Earth-Kind Perennial Research Garden and the rose and crepe myrtle gardens just across the park’s foot bridge. For a picnic lunch, choose between the green lawn or the covered tables under the Pole Barn. Fishing aficionados are welcome to bring their own poles and cast lines from the gazebo overlooking the catch-and-release pond. By quitting time, your kids will leave with a headful of farming knowledge and maybe even pockets stuffed full of wheat.