The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Rock crushers, coal car rides, minerals displayed
KENT >> Visitors journeyed into Connecticut’s industrial past this weekend at the 32nd annual Connecticut Antique Machinery Fall Festival. The event ran Friday through Sunday and, according to organizers, attracted about 4,000 visitors to the Connecticut Antique Machinery Association’s grounds on Kent-Cornwall Road.
The crowd saw an antique tractor exhibition, several food and craft vendors; a working blacksmith shop,antique train rides and demonstrations of a restored operating giant industrial steam engine, a rock crusher and a sawmill.
Sunday afternoon, one of the dozens of rows of antique tractor exhibitors on the main lawn, David Wright, showed visitors his red 1968 and 1972 Speedex garden tractors. “We’ve gotten a lot of people who have never seen these before,” Wright said. “It’s been a good turnout of people. There has been a lot of interest.”
Nearby, as a 1944 orange Cletrac crawler tractor shuffled by, a working rock crusher from the 1920s demolished trap rock for spectators. Farther along, visitors boarded a black 1925 Baldwin 242F locomotive to ride on its coal-car along a track for a half-mile to the end of the museum’s grounds. A few steps away,
a 1890s-era saw mill operated, splitting wood for onlookers.
“I like it all,” said John Pawloski, president of the Connecticut Museum of Mining & Mineral Science. “I grew up on a saw mill, working there as a child to an adult. So I have that history.”
As a circa-1874 Frick & Co. agricultural steam tractor engine chugged by, Pawloski said, “This is what made America inventive and have tremendous industry. We went from human power to water power to steam to gas to diesel to electric. We still use diesel and gas, but the majority is powered by electric today. Connecticut’s natural resources were tremendous.”
Although the state’s mining resources were depleted about a century ago, Connecticut still provides aggregate rock material. The Connecticut Museum of Mining & Mineral Science displayed several of the state’s former and current natural gems and stones. As Pawloski sat at a picnic table outside the museum, children came up to him with questions about what minerals they had found in the samples for handling.
“That is prehnite,” Pawloski said of a child’s discovery of a translucent, gemlike mineral in a large rock. Prehnite typically consist of calcium and aluminium, and its color ranges from blue to pink.
Journeying even further back into Connecticut’s past, in fact 200 million years, Pawloski gave a preview of the animatronic ceoleophysis statue at the grounds’ Connecticut Museum of Mining & Mineral Science. The 6-foot-tall raptor-like dinosaur snapped its razor-tooth-filled mouth and growled at guests via a motion sensor. The statue inhabits the under-construction Hall of Connecticut geology, which visitors could view as an exhibit over the weekend. The hall will formally open in May 2017.
“People love it,” Pawloski said. “The thing is 9 feet wide. They like to be scared.”
In a nearby pavilion, the C.H. Brown steam engine fired to life, with its 14-foot flywheel and crankshaft section buried in a brick section in the floor. Copious amounts of steam poured from the building’s chimney and into the surrounding area. The contraption was donated by Ed Clark, who owns Clark’s Trading Post in Lisbon, New Hampshire.
“It took five years of renovation to get it going,” Pawloski pointed out. “We have a crew of enthusiasts who are dedicated to the construction.” He added, “The plant shut down 80 years ago.”
Across the grounds, the Sloane-Stanley Museum gave people tours of its museum featuring the studio and antique hand tool collections of Eric Sloane, a prolific artist and collector of Americana. Outdoors, docent Joe Buda displayed his special exhibit entitled “For Good Measure,” his personal collection of historic measuring instruments. Buda pointed out a tavern’s metal measuring cups from the 1700s, a logging measuring board that dated from the late 1880s and a violin template that dated from 1670.
“Like Eric Sloane, I collect these for their artistic value,” Buda said. “I get them from antique stores and fairs.”
Back on the festival’s main lawn, while St. Luke’s Masonic Lodge No. 48 and the Kent Lions Club sold food at their shacks, visitors checked out the Cream Hill Agricultural School building on the grounds, which was originally at the Cream Hill Farm in Cornwall but was disassembled and restored piece by piece on the museum’s grounds in 1994.
“The school ran from the 1845 to after the Civil War,” Pawloski said. “It was started by Samuel Gold and his son Theodore. They were both graduates of Yale and they established it as a scientific farming school. Students were in charge of their own cows and chickens, and the school recorded how much they fed them, and how much milk the cows yielded, and the quality of the students’ gardens.”
Volunteer Carol Kent oversaw the historic oneroom classroom, complete with the original, and now antique, schoolbooks on the shelves. A couple of preteen girls sitting at the wooden desks balked when it was pointed out that only boys could attend the school in the 1800s.
“We have been getting several hundred people through here today,” Kent said.
Pawloski gave an impromptu tour of the meticulously restored living quarters behind the classroom, complete with an early steam-powered vacuum cleaner, a butter churner and antique wooden furniture and china.