We spent the past several articles reviewing many of the engine makes from various places in the U.S. and Canada. At shows you will often see an engine put together by a mechanic or engineer following his own ideas or saving some money over the current collectible prices. The Blumentritt engine, built in 1878 in [...]

I have done a couple articles recently on where traction engines were built. Most of that information came from Jack Norbeck’s Encyclopedia of American Steam Traction Engines and this material on portables comes from the same source. He also included in the book material on horses, pioneers of the industry, sawmills, threshers and shingle mills. [...]

When I started this series of articles many years ago, I featured the specific properties of various makes of engines in several articles. Since then several good books have been published listing the different engines and showing mostly pictures and brief descriptions of what they built. In many cases a company built several different models. [...]

Recently, I was looking at a picture of a sod house in Colorado where a local family stopped for overnight on their move West. I surmised that the roads there in 1917 were probably somewhere between crude and nonexistent. With all our maps and atlases and road numbers and signs — not to mention GPS [...]

I have mentioned a few times doing a bit of research for this series of articles. This time the whole process began with the donation of some photos and printed material from a rather recent friend I met at church. I have attended the local Methodist Church since about 1943 and my maternal grandmother was [...]