Engineering on show at Bathurst Agricultural Show
Take a peek into how things were done in the past
Make your own braai hook under the supervision of a real-life blacksmith; watch mielies being ground – and then take home a bag of mielie meal; and watch a frontier-era wagon wheel getting its metal “tyre” fitted and buy piping-hot hand-kneaded bread fresh out of a wood-fired oven.
Those are some of the not-quite-yet-lost arts you can experience and enjoy at the Bathurst Agricultural Museum’s stand at the Bathurst Agricultural Show on March 22-24, 2024. The museum is right next-door, but they’ll be bringing activities and memorabilia to the showgrounds so visitors to the show can get a taste of the cultural experiences on offer there.
Leading the charge when it comes to demonstrating frontier-era skills are museum stalwarts Alan Pike, who is also the curator, and Jon Pieterse.
“We’re going to be grinding straight-run yellow mielie-meal on a 1910 grist mill powered by a 1939 International Harvester LB stationary engine,” Pieterse said.
Visitors to the museum’s stand at the show would be able to buy bags of the freshly ground mielie meal. It will be sold in specially printed cloth flour bags which means it will also make a great from-the-farm gift.
There are other special hand-crafted gifts that you’ll be hard-put to find anywhere else. In addition to specially printed mugs, Tshirts and other memorabilia, you can buy rocket stoves (great for camping… and loadshedding), skillets, ladles and tripods for pots – all forged by the museum’s own blacksmiths!
Putting the metal covering on a wagon wheel is called “shodding” and Talk of the Town readers will recall photographs of the process from the Alexandria Geloftedag commemoration on December 16.
At 10am on Saturday March 23, visitors can watch this grassroots engineering operation being done, as it was when wagons were a primary form of transport. One of the wheels of a five-ton transport wagon donated by the Ballantyne family, and which is on display in the museum, will be “re-tyred”.
The museum will be offering tractor rides – on a trailer drawn by a tractor, that is.
And you’ll be able to see a 1928 John Deere tractor, as well as a mid-50s Field Marshall tractor, and a ‘Vaaljapie’ – a Ferguson TE20 – manufactured in the UK from 1946 onwards.
All of these things will be happening at the museum’s stand at the showgrounds; however, if you’d like to visit the museum, you can arrange it through Yolanda Hattingh, at the stand.