FOREST CITY, Iowa – Heritage Park of North Iowa will hold its 30th annual Steam Threshing Festival on Sept. 13, 14 and 15 at Heritage Park in Forest City. Free admission on Friday with activities for children in the morning and the ninth annual consignment sale in the afternoon. Admission on Saturday and Sunday is $6 for adults. Children 12 and younger are always admitted for free.
Butcher’s Steakhouse will run the Steel Wheel Cafe all three days from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.Heritage Park will hold an all-you-can-eat sweet corn and bologna feed at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday.
On Saturday, children ages 7 to 17 can see what school was like in the 1890s and attend Heritage Park’s Ellington School for half a day. They can sign up for the morning session, 9 a.m.-11:30 a.m., or the afternoon session, 12:30 p.m.-3 p.m. They will pack their own lunch and bring a tin can for drinking water, and they will ride a horse from the gate to the schoolhouse. They will say the 1892 version of the Pledge of Allegiance and will study arithmetic, penmanship and recitation. They will participate in a spelling bee. Claudia Tillman, fifth-grade teacher at Forest City Elementary School, will serve as the one-room schoolhouse teacher for the day. Cost is $15. Registration deadline is Sept. 6, 2013.
Other activities for children on both days will be pony rides, trolley rides, family scavenger hunt, finding money in a haystack, dressing up in old-fashioned clothes, washing clothes on a washboard, and beating rugs to clean them, and many more. Lisa Ralls, Naturalist at the Winnebago County Conservation Board, will be in the Trapper’s Cabin on Saturday and Sunday.
Saturday is also the day for a barn dance at 7 p.m. and campfire music at 9:15 p.m.
On Sunday at 9 a.m., Beaver Creek Church will hold a service led by the Jefson Brothers, and the message will be given by Mark Haugebak.
On both days, demonstrations outside will involve threshing by horse power, gas tractor, prairie tractor and steam; plowing by horse, steam, garden tractor, prairie tractor, wheel tractor; log sawing by prairie tractor; corn shelling by horse and steam; ensilage cutting, corn shredding and clover hulling by steam; rock crushing, shingle making and steam ice-cream making.
The Parade of Power will begin at noon on Saturday and Sunday.
Case is the featured brand for the 2013 show, and the Northland Case Collectors Club will participate. The club meets in Redwood Falls, Minnesota, and comprises Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin.
Check out the many buildings that will be open for tours during the festival: two log houses, a trapper’s cabin, houses from 1900 and 1030, a country store and the Holtan Art Museum, as well as the Timberland Museum, Gas Tractor Museum, Steam Threshing Museum, Fire Station Museum, Transportation Museum, Filling Station Museum and the Doll House Museum.
Heritage Park’s main entrance is near the intersection of B14 and U.S. Highway 69. GPS coordinates: 1811 Sage Court.
For a complete schedule, visit www.heritageparkofnorthiowa.
The Winnebago Historical Society is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. It is housed in the 1899 Mansion Museum at 336 N. Clark St., in Forest City, and it oversees Heritage Park, a 91-acre open-air museum on the south edge of Forest City. Its mission is to bring the past into the present for the future by educating children and adults through the Mansion Museum, reintroducing families to their past through the Leibrand-Whiteis Historical Center, and recreating the lives and livelihoods of our ancestors at Heritage Park of North Iowa.
