Buckley Old Engine Show puts past in motion

Aug. 18—BUCKLEY — The Buckley Old Engine Show grounds chuffed, rumbled and hummed with activity as exhibitors and volunteers got ready for the annual show.

Steam tractor owners took their machines out for a run as other owners towed their tractors for exhibit behind pickup trucks. Classic rides — a Willy's jeep here, an older blue pickup carrying a matching camper there — idled through the grounds as show organizers zipped by on golf carts.

It's all in preparation for the 55th annual Buckley Old Engine Show, which starts Thursday and continues into Sunday. The show schedule is packed with daily demonstrations of farm equipment and techniques, parades, a flea market, food, live music and more.

The event has been a long-running tradition for Joel VanAntwerp, an organizer who can remember coming with his grandfather to show the family's 1929 Hart-Parr 28-50 since he was 12. That was the early 1970s, and now Joel and son Nathan are back to demonstrate the machine on the show's magnet and paper schedule.

Heirloom machines like the Hart-Parr are the feature for the 2022 show, said Jim Luper, an organizer. Those include tractors or other vintage engine-powered equipment that have been in the same family for a few generations — or, as VanAntwerp said, got sold then tracked down and reacquired by a later generation.

It's the first feature since 2012, according to information about the show.

In Joel VanAntwerp's case, his great-grandfather bought the tractor in 1936 from a bank in Cadillac, and his grandfather used it to run a threshing machine, VanAntwerp said. And, even with a top speed of 2.4 mph, it got around, puttering along to other nearby farms to run threshers there.

"Over the years I've had dozens of people come up to me and say, 'I remember that tractor coming up to my farm when I was little,'" VanAntwerp said.

Some still do, but they're fewer as the years go by, he added.

Nathan VanAntwerp said he's fascinated by the tractor's handmade touches, like a sheet metal cover for the engine's oilers and wooden tool drawers in the cab.

It's keeping those stories and the history of mechanized farming alive that brings Joel VanAntwerp back, time and again. He's an engineer who loves to see the technological march from steam-powered behemoths to kerosene- and oil-fired tractors, then sleek and streamlined tractors and beyond.

There will be daily demonstrations of some of these machines in action doing everything from old farming techniques — plowing, butter making and threshing, to name three — to the more industrial — a working sawmill and a foundry where dinner bells are cast, according to show information.

Larry Fennema and Ryan Fennema, Larry's nephew, rolled through the grounds Wednesday atop their 1885 Birdsall steam tractor — the oldest tractor on the show grounds, Luper said. The Fennemas, helped by a young passenger, steered it among the rows upon rows of tractors, vintage cars and many things old and engine-powered, letting the tractor's whistle give a low howl here and there.

It's the looks of awe from youngsters, like the one in the cab that day, that Ryan Fennema finds so rewarding, he said. That's what will keep interest alive in these old machines and what they were used for, he said.

Larry Fennema credited the show for getting younger generations interested.

The machine has a long story: it was bought for the Henry Ford Museum before there was such a thing, then sold at auction to a man who almost completely restored it, Larry Fennema said.

For a tractor built 20 years after the Civil War ended, it had some modern touches, like a driveshaft instead of gears between the piston-driven flywheel and massive traction wheels, and an experimental rear wheel design that didn't quite work.

Larry Fennema said the wheels were supposed to keep a grip in any soil. Not so.

"If you get stuck, it'll dig a hole faster than you can imagine," he said.

There are other design misfires, too, like the 1913 Little Bull, Luper said. It's owned by the Northwest Michigan Engine & Thresher Club, the organization behind the show, and it's the grounds' oldest gasoline-powered tractor. But its one-wheel drive proved a mistake, and few Little Bulls still exist.

Preserving old designs is something Nathan VanAntwerp said he likes about the show. Other machines there are one of a half-dozen or less still in existence — the Fennemas' Birdsall is one of a dozen that they know of in the U.S., and only one of two that still runs, Larry said.

"If they're lost, then that one unique design is gone forever," Nick VanAntwerp said.

A pile of coal near the steam tractors has its own story. Tom Graham, who organizes the show's steam engine exhibitors, said a 22-ton truckload to replenish the engines came in at the very last minute. Otherwise, the steamers would have all been burning wood this year.

A supplier previously lined up for the show let Graham know some weeks ago that flooding had washed out the roads to the Kentucky mine that sourced the coal, he said. Lining up another source of nut-size stove coal wasn't easy until a Pennsylvania company that owns several mines came through with a load from its mine in Maryland once a driver could be found.

"It was really difficult, it was literally the only source I could find for coal," Graham said. "In fact, other coal sellers told me that if I could find anybody that has coal, please let them know."

There are tons of tractors, to be sure — Luper figured there were more than 1,000 and counting Wednesday afternoon — but it's also a showplace for all sorts of old engines. They range from the tiny, like old boat motors and stationary single-piston work engines, to the massive, like a huge steam boiler running a sawmill and the Snow, once used to run oil and gas equipment.

One giant standby, a 1918-built steam locomotive that typically pulls passengers around a short loop of track, won't be running, Luper said. It needed a repair that wasn't possible in time for the show.

But the Spirit of Traverse City, a miniature locomotive that once circled the Clinch Park Zoo, is running and giving rides, Lupin said.

And there are plenty that fall in between, like a gleaming red International Harvester pickup parked next to a tractor by the same maker, to a tiny, rusted Bianchina minicar that might fit in the pickup's bed.

Fritz Clous tended to another steam engine that once belonged to the Henry Ford Museum, one the industrialist is said to have found in the woods on a walk with President Warren Harding. The Gesier-made Peerless was built in 1885, and, on Wednesday, Clous had it hooked to a hydraulic log splitter.

Fritz Clous' brother, Leonard, helped found the show. Fritz recalled how, just before he died, Leonard reflected on the show he helped to create.

For Fritz, the show that started with the Little Bull is all about the history.

"It's the motion of the past," he said.