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The Whitley County 4-H Fair at Columbia City, Indiana is one of my favorite area attractions. In addition to a beautiful fairgrounds with abundant shade, large and varied livestock exhibits and a nice concession area, there are excellent antique machinery displays, sizable crowds and lots of activity.

The first thing I saw upon arrival was a barn-fresh wooden Aultman-Taylor threshing machine. Even as threshing machines go, this one is probably pretty old. It's in amazing original condition. After many years of inactivity it was getting some break-in action.

For anyone mechanically inclined, a threshing machine is fascinating to watch; there's a lot of stuff going on both in sight and sound.

Bundled grain is pitched from a stack or wagon onto a conveyor where rotating knives cut the twine. A rotating cylinder with spike-like teeth combs the grain out of the hulls, and the grain kernels, straw and hulls fall onto grates where gravity, oscillating motion and controlled air blasts separate out the grain. The straw and chaff make their way to the rear of the machine where a blower or "wind-stacker" drives them out through a long pipe into a straw stack. The grain is carried by an auger and a bucket elevator to a shute that delivers it to a bagger or into a wagon.

Old leather drive belts require some rejuvenation. Belt dressing gives them a surface that grips the flat steel or cast iron pulleys.

Jerry Yagel's Case C provides the power.

Very nice dump truck. I think this may be what Ford billed as the Model AA, the heavy-duty version of the Model A.

The agricultural museum is a work in progress. They have a very good collection of machines and hand tools on display already, and there's a mezzanine level that's still under construction.

I remember similarly equipped kitchens from my boyhood. This one is more nicely appointed than most of the ones I recall.

Some retired Columbia City fire trucks.

An extensive display of tractors going back to the teens. The two orange tractors in the foreground are Sheppard Diesels from the 1950s. They were sturdy, well-engineered tractors far ahead of their time in some respects. Despite their great advantage in economical operation, most farmers were reluctant or unable to come up with the intial purchase price, and Sheppard exited the tractor business after only a few years.

Early internal combustion tractors were patterned after steam traction engines and were large, heavy and expensive. They found use mainly on the large farms in midwestern prairies and in road building. Technological developments during WWI contributed to the development of compact, light-weight tractors that were sufficiently affordable and reliable for farmers with modest-sized farms to consider augmenting or replacing their horses. Some makers of horse-drawn implements bought fledgling tractor makers to add tractors to their line; Deere & Co. bought the Waterloo Gas Engine Company in 1918 for their Waterloo Boy tractors. The Waterloo Boy tractors were marketed in Europe as Overtime Tractors.

Styling became a factor in marketing automobiles in the 1920s, but didn't show up in the tractor marketplace until the late 1930s. Some companies hired their own industrial designers, and others commissioned well-known designers to update their machines. International Harvester hired Raymond Loewy as part of a general updating of the sturdy F-20, below.

Loewy's redesign took shape as the Farmall H, the largest-selling single tractor model ever built in America. Harvester's engineers made many updates mechanically, and Loewy's design went beyond style, incorporating changes that resulted in greater comfort, convenience and safety for the operator.

John Deere hired another well-known industrial designer, Henry Dreyfuss, to give its unstyled two-cylinder tractors a new look. John Deere got its first two-cylinder engine with the purchase of Waterloo Boy, and stuck with the two-cylinder tractors into the 1950s. They were rugged and reliable and ran well on kerosene which was cheaper than gasoline. Their trademark exhaust beat made them easy to identify from a great distance.

Allis-Chalmers hired Brooks Stevens to redesign the WC. I didn't find any examples of Stevens' work in the assembly of tractors here. Stevens is best known for Harley-Davidson motorcycles, the Milwaukee Road Skytop observation cars, and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.

Small single-cylinder open-flywheel engines were used for many tasks around the farm, like pumping water, grinding feed, and powering household appliances like washing machines. The open-top hopper holds water that surrounds the cylinder for cooling. Larger engines of similar design, in sizes up to tens of tons, powered grain elevators, feed mills, lumber mills, factories and electrical power stations.

Engines bearing the "Economy" brand name were built by Hercules and sold through the Sears Roebuck catalog. They were simple, durable and well-suited to farm use.

The animals are begging for our attention.

The weather was hot, and despite lots of large fans maintaining a breeze through the livestock pavilions and owners trying to keep them cool with squirt cans and water sprayers, most of the animals were lethargic. On a cooler day the hog pavilion can get rather noisy.

When I was a kid we showed dairy cattle at the county fair and at the 4-H fair. It's a lot of work. You start by selecting a good blood line, pay careful attention to care and feeding, and spend a lot of time prior to the fair training a creature that outweighs you by a factor of ten to one, to let you lead it instead of it dragging you across the barnyard. Show preparation involves trimming grooming, bathing, and more trimming and grooming.

Even the goats were rather subdued in the heat. Often they're intensely curious and social and will put their front feet up on the gates and reach out to try to check you out or solicit attention.

Young equestrians. It was pretty dusty out there.

Lots of calves.

For the poultry, game birds and rabbits I should have taken my pocket digicam. The big lens on my DSLR isn't well suited to taking pictures through the closely-spaced wires on the cages, but the digicam has a much smaller lens that could have peeked between them.

Guinea fowl are quick to raise an alarm when they spot an intruder. In this setting I thought they were a nuisance. Their constant clamor kept many of the other fowl agitated and pacing in their cages, and it was difficult to get pictures.

I think this rabbit breed is known as Lionhead. This one could have hidden out in a pack of Yorkshire Terriers and gone unnoticed.

This one looks like a character from a children's storybook.

Parade preparations getting under way

I shot this moments before an adult leader came up and admonished them, "Unless you've got enough money to pay for the fence, you'd better get off it before it breaks." They got down. For about two minutes.

My vantage point for the parade was atop a small set of bleachers in the staging area. It was dusty and not as comfortable as under the shade trees further along the route, but I had plenty of open sunlight and I got to see all the commotion of getting things together.

Good times! That's all 'til next year!