Machines of yesteryear
A mill whistle blew and a column of steam was seen over Agventure Land.
A long belt connected an 1898 Port Huron steam engine to a 1909 Frick sawmill. Fire roared in the burner and the blade began to spin.
"It’s fascinating watching machinery that’s been revitalized and works well,” said Kim Oliver of Coeur d'Alene. "It’s just a lot of fun to watch the old sawmill work."
Oliver stood near the antique steam engines on the north end of the North Idaho State Fair and watched as men from the Idaho Forest Group fed a fresh log into the mill and slowly cut it into boards.
"I think a lot of it is just looking at the moving parts, being able to see the moving parts,” Oliver said. "All your new machinery is computer operated and there’s nothing to be seen as far as the mechanics of it. These are mechanical wonders when you figure the time that they were built."
Steam engines were once used not only for transportation, but for farming and logging.
"We’re replicating the way they used to saw lumber in the olden days,” said Larry Benda, a boiler/kiln supervisor with the Idaho Forest Group. "With our modern machinery, we use computers and stuff. Back then, they didn’t have computers or anything, they just used steam engines and sawmills and manual labor."
The work was loud and dangerous, and often slow as logs were cut into boards one at a time. These demonstrations give people an idea of how North Idaho's forefathers got the job done.
"This lets everybody in the industry and the younger people see how things were done in the past," Benda said. "If they come to work for our sawmills, that’s the modern part of it, but they’ll also be able to understand the history of it."
Benda said the engines are kept in a collector’s shop outside Sandpoint.
“He basically has a museum,” he said. “He has like 50 of these.”
See the lumber methods of yesteryear during the antique steam engine and sawmill demonstrations today at 11 a.m., 1:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. on the north lawn of the fairgrounds.
“We get a lot of visitors, that’s for sure,” Benda said.