KENT, Conn.—If you build it, they will come—and come and come and come!
A steady stream of cars flowed onto the large parking field Saturday, Sept. 27, when the Connecticut Antique Machinery Association held its 40th Fall Festival under sunny skies. Crowds thronged the eight-acre campus to look at technologies from years past, to listen to traditional music, and to nosh on hamburgers and hot dogs served up by the Lions Club.
The association, a nonprofit museum, is dedicated to the preservation, restoration and demonstration of antique machinery from the nation’s industrial and agricultural past, covering roughly a century of steam, gas-powered and diesel engines.
The exhibition featured operating gas and steam engines, working farm equipment, a blacksmith shop, and a sawmill as well as an operating locomotive. The Association also hosts a comprehensive mining and minerology exhibit with new exhibits continually added to the collection. With its summer season drawing to a close the members will now spend the winter months restoring and repairing recent additions.
The field was filled on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 26-28, with displays of ancient machinery brought by collectors and vendors from far and near. Many of the machines on display have been meticulously restored, while others were rusted with pieces missing. Many of those were on sale to be stripped of remaining parts for those working on projects at home.
Tom Sideleau of Fairfield was one of those vendors with a variety of vintage items on display. Perhaps most intriguing was a Whizzer from the 1940s, its frame rusted and without a back tire. Sideleau said the motorized bike was sold by Schwinn and was a popular form of transportation in the World War II era when gas availability was limited.
The motor was sold either already mounted on a new bike or separately to be retrofitted on an already owned bicycle. The bike was not a child’s toy. “I think they were marketed more toward men to get to work,” Sideleau said. “It was a cheap form of transportation after the war.”
Many of the exhibitors were older men who remembered the machines from their childhood, or from their parents’ or grandparents’ using them, but there was a smattering of youngsters on the field who had taken a hand in restorations. Their participation was fitting as education is a primary mission of the organization.
One of the younger exhibitors was Zachary Dina, 13, of Marlboro, N.Y., who was there with his father, Matt. The youngster had just finished a four-month-long restoration of an early John Deere tractor that had been “in pretty rough shape” when they got it.
Young Dina said that parts for the 100-year-old tractor are no longer available. “You have to make the parts or spend lots of money to buy them [from dealers selling vintage items],” he reported
Not all the machines on view were farm machinery. There was a small enclave of vintage cars, some not frequently seen at car shows. A 1948 Crosley station wagon, one of only 23,489 ever produced, sat gleaming under a tree near the Cream Hill Agricultural School building that had been transported to the field.
Near it, Newell Atwood of New Hartford sat on the running board of the century-old Model T Ford pickup that he restored. Atwood, a former mechanic, said the vehicle was one four vintage cars he has restored. He still owns three of them, including the pickup, a 1914 touring car and a 1926 Ford Huckster truck once used to sell vegetables.
He got the 1925 Ford pickup out of a garage where it had sat for decades and rebuilt it painstakingly. It has 20 horsepower “when it is running good” but the intrepid motorist has driven it all over, taking it to shows as far away as Maine. “It can average a hundred miles per day,” he reported.
The older vehicles are coming back on the market, he said, and can be had relatively inexpensively because their owners are aging and selling them, while “younger” restorers are looking for the mid-century vehicles of their youth.
Over at the Lions’ pavilion, a large crowd had gathered to eat midway-style food. Just outside of the pavilion diners gathered at picnic tables under trees to listen to New England and European folk tunes played by Relatively Sound, a four-piece traditional band from Sharon.
For more information about CAMA, visit www.ctamachinery.org or call 860-927-0050. The all-volunteer organization is located at 31B Kent Cornwall Road, a mile north of Kent village.
