Annual Rough & Tumble reunion provides KINZERS There’ll be smoke in the air just east of Kinzers on Route 30 Wednesday through Saturday, but don’t look for a bam afire. Stop, instead, and join in the celebration of Rough and Tumble Engineers’ 36 annual Old Threshermen’s Reunion, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily.' There will be engines puffing, trains chuffing, saws whining and much more activity produced by steam power. Old gas engines, gas tractors, a horse tread, water rams and an oxen team round out the display of old-fashioned power supplies. And all of these will be operating for a four-day panorama of activities which reenacts an old fashioned threshermen’s reunion; that celebration which marked the end of the harvest season for steam threshermen and farm families. Festivities include games and contests, a daily pageant of threshing, oxen and steam train rides, old fashioned homemade food, a flea market, demonstrating craftsmen, special exhibits and much more. You can walk through the model building, where hand crafted miniatures of full-sized machines, some on the grounds, are connected to a live steam supply. Chugging, sputtering, revolving components show in miniature how this machinery operated in the days of steam power. Across the way the stationary steam engine building’s front room contains what one viewer called a “Culinary Museum”, for it displays much of Grandma and Great Grandma’s household For threshermen who are young and young at heart machinery. An exhibit of cast iron kitchen and parlor stoves, hand powered washing machines, butter churns, butchering kettles, sausage stuffers and steam can ners remind the ladies of the joys of having our current-day kitchen machine marvels. Behind this “home machinery” display room is a 40’ by 120’ room filled with old-time stationary steam engines. Can you imagine keeping a fire in the boiler and the pressure up in a steam pump 24- hours a day just so you would have water pressure in case of a fire on the ground? The Masonic Homes in Elizabethtown once had such a steam-powered pump, now on display at Rough and Tumble. There is also a Westinghouse generator, a steam-powered ammonia compressor which once provided refrigeration for a meat packing plant, and, of course, the Watts-Campbell steam engine which had powered a paper box factory all by itself. These stationary engines are hooked up to a steam source outside the building, and during Reunion most of them are running, the Watts Campbell whispering as its 20-foot high flywheel turns. To the north of the present structure Rough and Tumble members have placed the 120 ton Snow steam pumping engine which was a gift from the York Water Company, and a Harrisburg steam generator from the Masonic Homes in Elizabethtown. The two engines have been mounted on their new concrete bases and are in the process of being reassembled Fun... to become operating exhibits of the future. The museum building will be extended over them this fall. The steam-powered sawmill is a recreation of those which dotted the countryside at the turn of the century. Powered by a belt off a stationary steam engine, logs are turned into planks as the visitor watches, and oh, that lovely aroma of fresh-cut wood! A shingle mill elsewhere on the grounds can split a fine cedar shingle for you. There will be a special outdoor museum exhibit, collected and displayed just for the Reunion, of (Turn to PageES) Fun... * - , •- • % * m*** Fun... / 1
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers