Local residents and families are invited to a program, “Inventive Vermonters – A Sampling of Farm Tools and Implements”, at the Middletown Springs Historical Society this Sunday afternoon, Sept. 20.
Vermonters have come up with a large number of innovative labor-saving agricultural tools and implements in the past 200 years. Paul Wood, agricultural historian, will tell the story of some of these ingenious and surprising Vermont-invented and Vermont-made farm tools in a slide lecture at the Historical Society Annual Meeting on Sunday, Sept. 20 at 2:00 p.m., beginning with refreshments and a brief business meeting.
He will bring a display of some of the items he has collected – from bull staff to sap regulator, ox bow pin to milk tester, and boot drier to butter worker - and he will talk about the sometimes fascinating stories of the inventors.
A.W. Gray of Middletown was one of these. He received patents for a corn sheller in 1836, a horsepower treadmill in 1842, a machine for making cut nails in 1846 and an improved horsepower in 1856. In 1872 , with his sons, Leonidas and A. Y., he received a patent for an improved machine for making corrugated iron plates. In 1881, L. & A.Y. received a patent for a ratchet wrench and in 1881 for a thrashing machine. Copies of these patent documents from the Historical Society archives will be on display. One of their inventions as well as other early Middletown-made tools will be on display .
Paul Wood is a retired engineer with a lifelong interest in the history of technology, agriculture and industry – especially the tools, implements, machinery and techniques of farming, rural crafts, and the granite industry. He has been collecting and studying farming artifacts from the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries for more than 25 years. Paul uses his collection, housed in an old Vermont barn, as a bridge to better understand early life on the farm and the process of invention and manufacture. He has published numerous articles on Vermont industry and agriculture.
The program is made possible by support from the Vermont Council of the Humanities through its Speakers Bureau program. The meeting is free and accessible to people with disabilities.
All are welcome at this free event. For more information, call David Wright at 235-2376
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