The Old House Web
Steam behemoths like these were more common in the flat farm fields of the midwest. Though uncommon, they were used in the Northeast for their powerful flywheels.
Beyond the blaring music of the rides and the lure of the midway games, past the fried dough and funnel cakes and sizzling sausages and onions and delightfully drippy soft-serve ice-cream oozing from disintegrating cake cones, lies the heart and soul of Maryland's Montgomery County.
Montgomery County as it used to be, that is.
The "Old Timers Show" is a temporary working museum at the annual Montgomery County Fair. It harkens back to a simpler time in the Maryland county's history -- back before shopping malls, traffic and congestion. For two weeks before the annual fair, dedicated volunteers truck in everything from wooden Indians to antique tractors. The objects are real, but the life they represent is just an memory now.
Once upon a time, Montgomery County was farm country. Today those once fertile farm fields now sprout six-to-an-acre housing developments as the county is rapidly consumed by the sprawl of its high-tech corridor and the growing legions of federal workers from neighboring Washington, D.C.
In fact, if you look just beyond the fairgrounds, you can see the lighted signs of modern mega stores like CompUSA and Barnes and Noble.
Each year, folks hungry for their agrarian roots come to the fair's barn to reminisce. Suburbanites whose farm experiences consist primarily of powering up the Lawn Boy each Saturday marvel at life here before the Internet, before the remote-controlled garage door opener, before even the strip mall . . .
Each year, the fair prints 1,000 postcards on this lovingly maintained 1874 letterpress, each of them hand numbered.
Deborah Holmes helps edit The Old House Web. She's a former newspaper reporter and has written extensively for shelter magazines.
