Antique farm equipment gets new life at the Altamont Fair

The Enterprise — H. Rose Schneider

Andy Tinning looks over machinery at the Antique Farm Machinery Museum at the Altamont Fair. The museum has collected machinery no longer used by farmers over the years, but some equipment has been discovered, such as a grader discovered by Tinning buried in the woods.

ALTAMONT — Farming has changed over the years. Larger farms have grown, and new equipment has changed the way some farming is done. In and around Altamont, as farmers have switched to new equipment, some have brought their old tools to a new home at the Altamont Fair’s Antique Farm Machinery Museum.

The museum has been in existence “probably as long as the fair,” said associate fair member Bill Rockenstyre, 68, of Altamont, who has been volunteering at the museum for the last five years. Altamont hosted the first annual Albany County Fair in 1893.

The collection of equipment varies in type and era. Some dates back to the late 18th Century. Other pieces of equipment are replicas made only a few years ago.

Rockenstyre pointed out both an original “flop rake” used to pick up and pile together hay from the 1800s, as well as a modern replica created two years ago.

A “bone crusher” ground hooves and bones to go into chicken feed, so that chickens could get calcium for stronger egg shells, and a potato slicer chopped potatoes into quarters.

The museum is housed in a large barn where the equipment is kept year-round. Hanging from the ceiling are plows and equipment to cut ice. Below are motors, hay presses, a machine that plants corn and beans simultaneously, and a dog-powered butter churn.

Outside the barn is a corn-chopper used to create silage for cattle, and a windmill once used to pump water from a well; the windmill was refurbished in 2013 for its new location on the fairgrounds.

Andy Tinning, 73, of Princetown, pointed out a horse-powered road grader he had found in the woods near his home. Built for the Town of Guilderland Highway Department, the grader, in the 1800s, would have been pulled by horses with a blade underneath.

Tinning said he has displayed the grader in multiple parades, pulled by a driver in a tractor while he rides in the grader. Unfortunately for the driver, Tinning quipped, he was within reach of the whip originally meant to whip horses.

“I terrorized the hell out of him,” said Tinning, who said he would try to knock the driver’s hat off while he rode on his grader.

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