WAYNE TOWNSHIP – The Ashtabula County Antique Engine Club will close out its year with the Fall One Day Show on Saturday, Sept. 19.
The show, scheduled from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. on the club grounds at 4026 U.S Route 322, offers visitors one more opportunity this year to visit an era when machinery looked very different from today.
“We’re going to have everything running,” Ted Seifert, Antique Engine Club president, said. “Everything from our big 2,000 horsepower to little gasoline engines.”
The club’s collection goes well beyond antique tractors. Its grounds feature historic machinery, technology displays and the trades that helped build Ashtabula County, with demonstrations and exhibits offering a peek at how past generations worked, built and maintained their communities.
Some of the featured exhibits, according to Seifert, will be tractor-mounted ground pounders, an old one-room schoolhouse, a blacksmith’s shop and an antique gas station, a country store and a kitchen display that will serve as a sort of before-and-after.
Seifert said the kitchen will be set up to show how a typical farm kitchen looked before electrification and the labor-saving devices and conveniences that came afterward.
The Fall One-Day Show will also host two large agricultural history museums showcasing the equipment typical of a working farm during the 1940s through the 1960s, according to Seifert.
The club’s summer show attracts thousands of visitors, but the fall show provides a different opportunity for enthusiasts and families to visit the grounds in a more relaxed, and less crowded, setting.
“(The Fall One-Day Show) is not as big,” Seifert said. “But we still put on a show. It’s the last of the season before we shut down for the winter.”
Visitors can browse a flea market, tour the exhibits and enjoy food from the club kitchen.
For the people who collect, restore and operate the equipment the shows are about more than machinery.
They preserve knowledge that could vanish as the people who remember the machines in everyday use grow older.
“We are a 501c3 club,” Seifert said. “We preserve together for historic purposes.”
The Ashtabula County Antique Engine Club was founded in 1982 and has grown to 400 members devoted to preserving antique engines, tractors, vehicles and other equipment. The club also maintains its grounds throughout the year, with volunteers gathering regularly for workdays.
“We hope people take away an appreciation for what people had to go through during, say, the ‘40s before there were a lot more conveniences,” Seifert said.
Admission is a $5 donation for adults. Club members and exhibitors are admitted free.
For antique machinery fans, it’s a chance to see some impressive old iron. For families, it’s an opportunity to see history in motion and maybe hear some stories from the people who’ve made a hobby of preserving it.
