Pioneer Acres Museum is hosting its 56th annual show with this year’s theme being Alberta’s Pioneer Steam Power Festival. The festival features a variety of massive machines dating back to the early 1900s that will be operating for the three-day show starting August 7th. “These engines are the guys that pulled the plows, that broke the prairie sod back in the early 1900s,” said Bob Anderson, Pioneer Acres president. “Before that, it was buffalo pasture and development of farming happened over the following decades, especially with these engines pulling the big plows, breaking the sod.” Anderson says many of the steam-powered tractors in the collection have a local connection. “Our steam engine here, the 65 horsepower Case was owned by a family on the other side of the river at Gladys,” he said. “And descendants of that owner will be here on the weekend to talk about the family history.” Short life span Brian Manning is a member of Pioneer Acres but is also the curator of agriculture and industrial collections at the Reynolds Museum. He says the steam engines were powerful workhorses on the prairies but they had a short life span. “Most of these steam engines lasted only maybe 10 or 15 years,” he said. “The water at that time had so much alkaline in it (that was bad for) the boilers, a lot of these have had an extensive boiler work to keep them running but it’s the passion of the people to keep them running.” Manning says the steam engines at Pioneer Acres make up the largest collection of operating steam engines in the province right now. He says around 1910 they could work 15 to 20 acres a day where a horse was maybe two or three acres a day." “A lot of farmers were still using horses,” he said. “A lot of the bigger farms would use these big tractors but a group of farmers would get together and pool all their money and buy one and just kind of use it around the group of them.” And the steam tractors were powerful machines that provided the farmer with instantaneous power as soon as they wanted to move. “We have a fire, we burn the coal, this time we’re burning wood,” he said. “Boil the water to make the steam that runs the engine, there’s so much pressure inside the boiler, most of these are running around a maximum pressure of 150 pounds per square inch.” Always learning something new Diana Rowe is the park’s volunteer marketing coordinator and says she’s always learning something new at Pioneer Acres. “At my age of 72, I had no idea there were steam cars back in the day, but we will have two steam cars on exhibit here,” she said. “This is where history comes alive, it really does and people come here and they say ‘I remember this from my past, or going to visit my grandparents and I saw this on their car’.” Doug Callahan was invited to participate in this year’s event to showcase his newly restored Case Steam Roller and it’s a rare piece of machinery. “There’s three other operating ones that I know of and there’s probably four or five that could run,” he said. “So I think there’s less than ten left in existence, Case built around 35,000 traction engines so they were the biggest in the world by far but they didn’t build as many rollers.” Callahan purchased the roller in Ontario and spent close to two years having it restored. The paint job was just finished at the end of July and he’s proud of it. “I’ve always liked old machinery and steam and once it gets into your blood, it’s just there,” he said. “That was state of the art technology in its day and you look at today - all the electronics on the modern vehicles, I couldn’t care less, not interested.” Learn more about the show here.
