Watch The Past Come To Life At Harvest Festival

On Saturday, (Sept. 28), from 10 am to 2 pm, visitors can enjoy the Harvest Festival at  The Curran Homestead Living History Farm and Museum,  372 Fields Pond Road in Orrington.  This is an opportunity to grab the family and take a step back in time to an era when your parents, grandparents or great-grandparents were young, plus observe and take part in many activities that would be very familiar to members of those generations.

Activities include:

• Take a sightseeing tour of the Curran Farm with a hayride by draft horses Prince and Charlie
• Or embrace early mechanization with a ride in a 1917 Model T automobile.
• Watch the antique cider mill turn; help turn the crank, and see how bushels of local apples are transformed into a tasty beverage.
• There will be young goats to pet, and visitors can see the newest addition to the Curran family: “Atticus,” a 4H lamb
• Barbara Lilieholm will be demonstrating spinning, turning raw animal fleece into yarn and thread that could be used to make clothing.And Anne Eaton Harrison will demonstrate her circular sock knitting machines, an ingenious implement that saved much time in rural homes a century ago.
• There will be a Blacksmith demonstration turning iron and steel into useful and decorative items.
• Cookies will be baking  and applesauce will be made on the original wood cookstove in the farmhouse kitchen. Taste corn chowder in the dining room!
• Maine Antique Power Association, will be displaying his antique engines and demonstrating how early gasoline—and kerosene-powered flywheel engines eased the daily burdens of farm life a century ago. Also a home-engineered woodsplitter, a remarkable product of “Yankee Ingenuity” powered by a century-old Sattley flywheel engine originally sold by nationwide retailer Montgomery Ward.
• Members of the Maine Antique Tractor Club will be staging a jitterbug pull at 11 am; using 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s vehicles, they will engage in a contest to see whose home-engineering contraption can pull the most weight and claim the bragging rights.
• The pumpkins are ripe and ready for painting

Harvest Festival Admission for adult members is $7, children and students $5, with a maximum family cost of $24. For non-members: Adults $8, children and students $6, with a maximum family cost of $28. Admission includes all events, activities and food samples.

The Curran Homestead, celebrating its 23rd Anniversary year, is a living history farm and museum preserving a vast collection of eclectic, turn-of-the-20th-century artifacts for education purposes. Using these original and reproduction artifacts, the Curran volunteers provide hands-on experiences and exhibits illustrating the rural farm-family culture and economy in Maine, provoking thought and discussion about our history.

The Curran Homestead is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) non-profit educational center that preserves and perpetuates the culture, values and lifestyle of the family farm in rural eastern Maine, and relies upon membership, donations, and our local community for support. For more information, go to www.curranhomestead.org

DIRECTIONS FROM BANGOR:

Cross the Penobscot River to Brewer and proceed out Wilson Street; at McDonalds turn right onto Greenpoint Road and go to the end. Turn left on Wiswell Road and go 1.6 miles to a right turn onto Fields Pond Road. The Curran Homestead is on the right about 1 mile.