There's no history museum in North Augusta, unless you count Gordon Farmer's house.

And the building behind the house.

And the buildings at Augusta Concrete Block Co. near the river.

Behind the 12-foot-tall stacks of concrete blocks and the towering machines that make them is the most unlikely location for a treasure trove.

During a tour of the collection, get accustomed to hearing "that's rare" because it will be said a lot, such as when Mr. Farmer shows off the 1914 Westinghouse double fans or the Zenith shortwave radios that were distributed to people who went to Japan after World War II.

A nearby garage holds a 1954 Rolls-Royce, a 1931 Packard and four Jaguars. The 86-year-old semiretired owner of the block company remembers where he got them all.

"I love Jaguars. I bought this one from an officer from The Citadel; he was fixing to go to Vietnam in 1964," he said.

Neither he nor anyone else in his family knows how many thousands of items are in his collection.

As much as he's known in the area for his collection of antiquities and memorabilia, Mr. Farmer also is a survivor. Only a few years after Germans were shooting at him over the skies of Europe during World War II, he had businessmen shooting threats at him back at home to put him out of business.

Augusta mason Richard Ingram has been a customer since the 1950s. He said he was impressed with Mr. Farmer's military service and intrigued by the antiques collection but holds the man's integrity above them.

"Whatever Gordon Farmer tells you, you can take it to the bank," said Mr. Ingram, the owner of Richard Ingram Masonry. "He's always made a good product and stands behind what he makes."

Being the small guy on the block, Augusta Concrete Block Co. has been the one setting the standard, forcing the competitors, though larger companies, to cut prices to compete with the service. Eventually, a lot of them fell and asked Mr. Farmer to buy them out.

The collector - of cars, Coca-Cola memorabilia and rare antiques such as a pocket watch made in 1670 - alsowas collecting block-manufacturing companies.

The man museum

"There ain't enough time in the day to look around in there," said one of Mr. Farmer's employees, locking the door of the old antiques store that is now one of the storage areas for his collection of things such as jukeboxes, scientific instruments, radios and scales.

Mr. Farmer has been finding historical artifacts since he was 5 years old.

"His mother would pack him a lunch, and he would go out and look for arrowheads," said his wife, Martha Claire.

Mrs. Farmer said their three children all have an interest in antiques. She is a collector herself, though her interest is in furniture and china.

"Sometimes I get real frustrated because he'll bring home something-another clock, another picture-and he'll say, 'Where we going to hang this?' He thinks I can manufacture these places to put something up. He just got a cuckoo clock. We've had a terrible time finding a place to put the cuckoo clock," Mrs. Farmer said.

Mr. Farmer has parted with parts of his collection. He has donated a fire engine and a cotton gin to the Augusta Museum of History, where he spent 13 years on the board of directors.

His mind might have been the more important contribution than the historical items, said politician Jack Padgett Jr., who sat alongside Mr. Farmer on that board throughout the 1990s. Mr. Farmer made sure that what was done for the museum was historically accurate.

"He is a pure student of history, really. He has spent the better part of his life collecting and documenting," Mr. Padgett said. He recalled sitting with Mr. Farmer for an hour after meetings just discussing history.

"It's amazing that it's all in his head," museum Director Nancy Glaser said.

Ms. Glaser said she would like to see Mr. Farmer write down everything he knows about his collection. Mr. Farmer's daughters, Rebecca and Melissa, have started an inventory of the collection at home.

"I've seen it. It is rather eclectic, but he has a wonderful eye. He has a knack for knowing what to save," Ms. Glaser said. "He's one of the people in the museum world that we love because he saves everything."

He saved the cotton price ticker from the old Augusta Cotton Exchange. He has the clock that was in the house of the Martinez family for which the town was named. He saved the 153-year-old Hamburg railroad station.

Yes, the whole railroad station. It's near the railroad tracks that dissect the block company.

Mrs. Farmer said her husband has never read a fictional book in his life. If you find his nose in a book, it is on coins or scientific instruments.

Mrs. Farmer said getting a gift for her husband is tough. What do you get a man who once owned a gold mine and has a book autographed by Robert E. Lee?

There are pieces of the history of his own business, however, that aren't around anymore.

Mr. Farmer parted with the original handmade concrete block molds. He gave them to a Baptist missionary who took them to Africa.

It's not the only donation he has made to a church.

After a fire in 1983 destroyed part of his church, Grace United Methodist in North Augusta, he took a few of the stained-glass windows and stored them.

"He came and took two of those windows, 10 feet tall. He had them built into a new casement with fluorescent lights behind them and gave them to the chapel," said his pastor, the Rev. James Adams. "Recently, in the first Sunday in May, we dedicated and consecrated two additional stained-glass windows that he donated."

Dr. Adams said they were part of the tradition of the church. Mr. Farmer has a historical presence about him: He acquires and maintains history, then finds a way to put the items back into use.

The pastor remembers Mr. Farmer for other acts of kindness. Mr. Farmer always donates a bike for an annual church auction. The bikes come from the 1930s and 1940s.

"In fact, I was going to bid on one and he said, 'Don't,'" Dr. Adams said. "I'd like to have one because it goes back to the '40s, and those were my years. He said, 'I'll bring you one.' A couple of days later, I found a brand-new J.C. Higgins bicycle sitting at the back of my carport. Mint condition, like brand new."

When the minister thinks of Mr. Farmer, he sees yellow because the 86-year-old is flamboyant with his clothing. Color choice has a lot to do with Mr. Farmer's fondness for his alma mater, Georgia Tech.

A jacket's flight

Mr. Farmer went into the Army a week after obtaining his mechanical engineering degree from Georgia Tech in 1943. The Army made him a first lieutenant and assigned him to navigate the commander's B-17 bomber in the 490th Bomb Group.

"You assume that you're going to be shot at first because you're in the lead plane with the commander," Mr. Farmer said. "We were always lucky that we escaped being shot down completely. Our wingmen got shot down, but not us."

During a mission to bomb an oil facility in Czechoslovakia in 1945, those wingmen took a beating. The bombers were flying in a cloud corridor. It was overcast at 27,000 feet. There was an undercast at 25,000 feet.

"We were looking for a P-51 escort. The co-pilot in the tail saw some aircraft drop down," Mr. Farmer recalled.

They weren't the escort, though; they were four German jets, the first time he had seen the Messerschmitt Me 262 in action. The Germans shot down three B-17s before disappearing back into the clouds.

"We had a rough day that day," he said.

A rougher day was to come. That was during a mission to bomb a railroad station in a suburb of Berlin as the Allied forces were closing in on the German capital. It would be Mr. Farmer's last mission of the war.

A bombardier's error in finding the target on the first run prompted a second run. The Germans were ready, and filled the skies with anti-aircraft fire.

"When the Germans shot at you, you were in trouble because they had that 88 mm anti-aircraft gun. ... Flak was popping in every direction. It knocked out the two right engines on our airplane."

He was thankful that he'd written down the coordinates to the most forward air base the Allies could use in an emergency. They headed there. The crew threw out everything that wasn't bolted down to reduce the weight in the bomber, which had half of its propulsion.

On the damaged engines, one of the propellers continued to rotate in the descent, spinning so fast that the heat melted the cooling fins.

"The airplane was shaking like it was going to pull apart because it was vibrating so," Mr. Farmer said.

Everyone was standing in the door with their parachutes except Mr. Farmer and the pilot. He was busy finding the air base. They passed over the front line trying to get to the air base. They could determine the front by the billows of blue smoke from the artillery.

They landed safely, Mr. Farmer said. After the crew got back to England three weeks later, it never went on another mission. The war ended in a few days.

From then on, the only thing shot at him would be threats by business competitors.

Blocks by hand

"What would he do with his collection if he didn't have that big plant over there?" Mr. Padgett said with a laugh.

Mr. Farmer said he held on to his company instead of selling out because he loved his job and could never part with something he had built with his own hands.

Later, his attention turned to keeping the business so he could hand it over to his son, Jim.

Mr. Farmer left the family's Stellaville, Ga., farm in 1938 and headed to college in Atlanta. He said he always had an interest in mechanical things, especially steam engines, so he picked engineering for his degree.

After he went through college and the war, it was 1945 before he got home. The arrowheads that had started his collection were gone. One of his nephews had used a few for an Eagle Scout project.

Mr. Farmer had $5,000 in his pocket and a few job offers - one from Goodyear.

A comment by a sister-in-law gave him the idea for his own business. She had overheard some veterans saying concrete blocks were the next big thing.

Mr. Farmer got advice from a businessman he respected. The advice was not to do it because $5,000 wouldn't buy any equipment or inventory, and he had no credit because he had just gotten out of the Air Corps.

"I didn't pay any attention to him," Mr. Farmer said.

He and his brother, Pierce, who was 14 years older, set out to go into the block business.

He got second-hand molds that made concrete blocks by hand. He built the racks and pallets himself. There were no concrete mixers to be found in the South, so he made his own by cutting a boiler in half.

Mr. Farmer put his mechanical engineering degree to the test. Through a series of pulleys he was able to get a 1,800-rpm motor to turn the drivetrain at 20 rpm.

Mr. Farmer said the handmade setup turned out a nice 20-pound block so that masons could lift with one hand and spread mortar with the other.

Augusta Concrete Block was a handmade shop for five years. Mr. Farmer paid his workers one-half cent per block. A worker who made 1,200 blocks a day earned $6, which was $30 per week at a time when some of the best jobs in Augusta paid $20 per week.

"I had my mother's car, which was a LaSalle seven-passenger car," Mr. Farmer recalled. "I would go over there early and bring them to work. At the end of the day, I would carry them back over there to the black section of town in front of the liquor store. They would say they needed a drink to get that cement dust out of the throat."

Because of the pay, people were lined up to work for Mr. Farmer. He said he found some of the best block makers in the city and kept them.

Mr. Farmer said he gave the workers an incentive: If they made 1,600 blocks in one day, he would buy them a fifth of liquor. They made the quota.

On the front page of The Augusta Chronicle on July 22, 1956, the area's first concrete-block maker celebrated 10 years in business with a $130,000 expansion. The Farmer brothers' machinery could make 8,000 blocks a day, doubling the output.

"Put you out of business" was a mantra he heard throughout the next four decades. Competing companies came and went, all trying to undercut the price to get business away. A competitor sat on a bank board and blocked Mr. Farmer's loans for new equipment. Mr. Farmer went to a new bank after discovering it. When competing companies went under, they sold out to Mr. Farmer.

As he recalls the big companies facing off with him in his first decades in business, Mr. Farmer mentions Claussen Concrete Products, which sold out to Merry Bros. Brick and Tile in 1966. A few years later, Mr. Farmer bought out Merry and then had possession of the largest ready-mix concrete plant in Augusta.

"I sold all the machinery. I was going to run it for a year and then close it down, but it was in such bad shape," he said.

In an era when there wasn't as much integrity as there needed to be, Mr. Farmer stood out, Mr. Padgett said: "No shady deals. No undercutting anybody."

"I never met anyone who had something bad to say about Gordon Farmer," Mr. Ingram said.

The block company has always been a family affair. Pierce Farmer died in 1975 and left his share of the business to his son, Wayne, who sold it to Gordon Farmer a few years later.

That allows him to be semiretired, which means he goes to the plant to get out the payroll when son Jim is away. He is mostly at the plant to go through his collection.

What to do with that collection after Mr. Farmer is gone?

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," Jim Farmer said.

Mrs. Farmer said it should become a museum in North Augusta.

Reach Tim Rausch at (706) 823-3352 or timothy.rausch@augustachronicle.com.