Travels with Twinkles: Oakley - Colby - St. Francis and Bird City, Kansas

July 29-30, 2021:

I am taking route 62 north to Colby, Kansas where I stop at the Prairie Museum of Art and History which consisted of a mix of very good historical exhibits and some donated collections that were not so interesting to me. I found the outside building exhibits to be more interesting, especially the massive barn (largest in Kansas) and the reconstructed sod house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colby,_Kansas

https://prairiemuseum.org/about-1

https://kansassampler.org/8wondersofkansas-architecture/cooper-barn-colby

Belle of the Plains Flour bag

The Flying Dutchman

Quite a life with a tragic ending

Kansas roads were little better than trails

Colby was not a pleasant place to live in 1935

A scary story

I'm wondering if the Golden Buckle was before or after the dust bowl

I had a similar lunch box once

Very cool fire department car

Sod house looks pretty rustic from the outside

While the inside looks very comfortable

I could easily live in this place

The most impressive Cooper Barn

It's hard to believe how they moved it to the museum grounds

Second floor view - the design and craftsmanship is amazing

I spent a rushed hour here, the lower level was filled with farming history

I then get on route 184 west to Woodland, Kansas, a city I had passed through a couple of years ago. I return to Main Street to look at the worlds most beautiful telephone building (In my opinion) again and look to see if the old 30-50’s cars are still at parked at the rod shop, all is fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodland,_Kansas

The telephone building

Woodland has many impressive buildings and these big wide streets

Next I head on route 27 north, the land and sky scenic route, to St. Francis, Kansas which I explore for a while, finding a small but nice downtown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Francis,_Kansas

I came upon this old weathered elevator somewhere near town

The Cheyenne Theater

The Cheyenne theme painted on a window

The Cheyenne County Courthouse

Downtown view

I then drove a few miles east to Bird City, Kansas to the Tri-State Antique Threshers Show. You can camp overnight in the parking field for free so that becomes my overnight spot. They are having various antique tractor pulls which are not really terribly exciting. It seems though that most of the people in attendance are friends or family members of the contestants, it’s all pretty gosh darned country flavored. I can say that because I grew up like one of them, sort of, in Dutch Neck, New Jersey. The highlight of the show was when three of the Steam Tractors did pulls at dusk when you could see the sparks fly from their exhaust stacks. One thing that I was disappointed in was that there was little, almost nothing, in the way of fair food. If you had reserved in advance a dinner was provided at extra cost, but otherwise it was only water, soda, snow cones or cotton candy for sale. It was a most interesting crowd for people watching and I did get some good photos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_City,_Kansas

http://www.threshershow.org/

Only antique tractors competed in the pull, the modern tractor was used only to move
the sled back to the starting line

The star of the show is this 150 HP Case Tractor that was reproduced from original Case Tractor production drawings. Only a few of these Tractors were built, no working
originals exist and this thing is the rock star of tractor pulling at the moment, see the link below.

https://150case.com

The Tractor builder had given a talk and answered questions just before this photo was taken

Just happened upon this photo of these cute young Menonite boys in front of the 150 HP Case

An Avery Steam Tractor

The new Huber Steam Tractor

A line up of various Steam Tractors

Another photo with three Case Tractors in the foreground

They have many parts that require constant maintenance

I love the Avery Steam Tractor Bulldog mascot which says "Teeth Talk"

In the morning it was cloudy and actually almost cold, the temperature had dropped overnight, enticing me to wear jeans and a long sleeve shirt, first time in two months. There were many demonstration events going on such as corn shelling, wood cutting, wheat separating, plowing and several others all using antique engines of some kind. The highlight of this show was the monster Case Steam Tractor rated at 150 HP, of which only a few were actually made and no other complete ones exist. In fact this is not an original Tractor, this is a reproduction built precisely to Case Company drawings, and a big big deal in the Steam Tractor world ! It put on a pretty amazing plowing demonstration on a show grounds field pulling about a 20 bottom plow. It was also going to perform a dynamometer test later in the day, but I didn’t stay to see that. A wheat separating demonstration video is shown below.