‘Possum Holler” isn’t found on any Indiana road map. But by mid-August each year, the population of this unique Hoosierville, normally home to only a handful of guinea fowl and a passel of pesky ’possums, swells to 300,000 people. All find their way there to explore the state’s grand agricultural heritage.
Possum Holler is the informal name of the Pioneer Village at the Indiana State Fair. The weathercock atop the grain bin-capped gateway to the Village has much to crow about this year. The opening ceremony of the State Fair’s 17-day run will take place just below on Aug. 5. This year marks a golden milestone for the Pioneer Farm and Home Show, which began as the “Milestones in American Agriculture” exhibit.
“It was ’61 or ’62, we can’t decide which really it was …” Village patriarch Mauri Williamson said of the year he brought the Purdue Ag Alumni Association’s collection of artifacts to the fair. “Our records weren’t too good back then.”
That makes this year either the 50th anniversary of the exhibit, or just the 50th exhibit. “That’s what it is,” said Williamson, Possum Holler’s ambassador who sounds more like its politician by agreeing to both.
No matter the actual starting year, one thing’s for sure: the seed of what began in an upper floor room of the old grandstand sprouted and grew, like a giant bean stalk, to another world across the fairgrounds.
Williamson, 86, a member of Whitewater Valley REMC, said the Pioneer Village now encompasses seven to eight acres on the northeast side of the fairgrounds in multiple barns and buildings. Along with a vast collection of old farm implements and tools, the Pioneer Village is a living history museum teeming on peak days with up to 200 or more volunteers working threshing machines, steam engines and sorghum presses. Farm animals inhabit the Village’s pin-frame barn which was renamed in honor of Williamson last year.
Traditional artisans such as carpenters, broom makers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, coppersmiths, potters, butchers and maple syrup makers also display their talents and wares. There are old-time musicians and dancers, too.
In his long-time position with the Purdue ag alumni, Williamson traveled all over the state and became well known for his enthusiasm for farming and his humor. Through the connections he made, he was able to enlist the volunteer corps of folks who bring the crafts and machinery of Possum Holler to life. “He is the one who went out and found the people who make Pioneer Village what it is, as well as the artifacts,” said Tim Nannet, who took over for Williamson as the official manager of the Pioneer Village five years ago.
Williamson has remained a fixture at the event as a tireless supporter, organizer and “Village voice.”
Williamson recalls first seeing the artifact collection that became the basis for the exhibit at Purdue University when he came to the West Lafayette campus as a teenager for the 4-H roundup. That was in the early 1940s.
It was started by Purdue’s dean of agriculture and the head of ag engineering. “They decided we should start preserving this heritage, and they collected this stuff and kept pretty careful records of it,” he said.
Then World War II came along, and the collection was put in a dormitory attic and temporarily forgotten.
In 1961, a vacant room in the balcony of the old grandstand was offered to the Purdue ag alumni to display the artifacts. Despite the modest surroundings — on the same floor, Williamson noted, as the IRS exhibit, the Post Office exhibit, a men’s restroom and a room full of pigeon droppings (this grandstand was soon to be replaced by the current one) — Williamson jumped at the chance to have the collection find a larger audience at the State Fair. “It’s always been pretty important to ag organizations that people know about us,” he said.
That first show attracted 40,000 visitors. “We decided it was worth our while to do,” he said.
The collection moved to other buildings the next several years before taking the big leap across the race track to what Williamson called the “hinterlands” at the time. The northside offered the growing collection and machinery room to spread out. The move was not without some growing pains — especially on the neighbors. “There was a T-shirt shack right out there,” he recalled. “The sparks from the steam engine burnt that tent right down. And we were always having trouble with the teddy bear stand and the soot from the steam engines.”
More recently, new buildings have been added to house a whole assortment of the acquired implements in various stages of rust and rehab. A new focus of the Village is to show visitors the annual restoration projects at hand.
“We need to know our past to understand where we came from and where we are,” Nannet noted. “In the bigger picture, the public needs to know where its food comes from.” He said much of today’s massive modern machines still use the same concepts as those early implements. The Village engages and educates visitors about these concepts using the simplicity of the older, smaller machinery.
“We work hard to keep it an agricultural fair,” said Williamson, lamenting that some fairs even in farm-belt states have evolved away from the agricultural roots to stay “modern.”
Modern is a relative term anyway. An Allis-Chalmers combine from the early 1960s is now part of Pioneer Village. It was the latest technology when Williamson first brought the exhibit to the fair. It’s at home with a wooden plow from 1815, the year before Indiana became a state. These two things — and the thousands of other Village relics — represent the people, animals and machines that cultivated the land to make Indiana our home. And they still represent those who work the land for us all today.
— by Richard G. Biever, senior editor
The State Fair’s Pioneer Village captures the feel of a working farm of long ago to show how agriculture was and to help illustrate the simple concepts still used by much of today’s giant, high-tech machinery.
Arthur Redinger chisels out a peg hole in one of the boards that will cap his workbench with a new smooth working surface for this year’s fair. The Union County carpenter, who was working at the village in mid-July, will be demonstrating old-fashioned carpentry skills each day of the fair.
Photo by Richard G. Biever
• Click here to go to the August 2011 Electric Consumer table of contents
• Click here to go to the Indiana State Fair's website
• Click here to go to Indianapolis Star photos of the Pioneer Village from past fairs