Oude Ambachten Einighausen

On the first Sunday of August (put this on your calendar for next year) is the Old Crafts Fair in Einighausen, NL.  Einighausen is just west of Sittard.  Take exit 48 of A2.  It should be easy to find.  I am going there today and will write about it this evening.  The fair runs from 1300-1800 today only.  There will be about 100 crafts demonstrated; mostly farm crafts and chores as they were done 50-100 years ago.  The highlight is a demonstration of the entire process from reaping grain to baking the end product.  Various horse-drawn and by-hand methods will be shown.  Hopefully the weather will hold out.  I think this will be a fun day.  Parking is free, entrance is five Euros for adults.  Go to http://www.oudeambachten.nl/ for more information.

Report

I found the feest very easily.  Parking was well marked. NOTE: The parking area was a recently harvested wheat field.  You would have a very hard time walking in this field with fashionable shoes.  Walking or hiking shoes would be best.  The exhibit area was a closed loop (a triangle really), which made seeing everything very easy.  I made the loop once looking at things on the right and then made it again looking at things on the left. The brochure said there would be 100 crafts and I think they were close to the mark.  The following is a partial list of what I can remember:  Blacksmith, willow weaving, threshing machines, threshing by hand with a flail, baking, kite-making, stained glass, several grist mills, two music machines, rope-making, tatting, wool spinning, horse-drwn reaping, sawing, wine-making, bee keeping, milk processing, face painting, puppet theater, oil seed pressing, bonsai trees, hand clothes washing, and many more.  There were lots of displays of almost anything related to farm life from 100 to 50 years ago.  There was a falconer with several birds of prey doing demonstrations, dog carts and goat carts walked around the loop.  There were many steam engines and hit & miss engines driving various pieces of equipment such as grist mills and threshers.  There was a childrens play area but I skipped that so I don't know what was there.  There were at least five bands playing a variety of music styles.  The whole route was lined with old farming equipment, tractors, and static displays.  The sawer was cutting large timbers on a large sawmill. 

Most of the signs were written in Limburgs, the local dialect and the few people I talked to all started off in Limburgs and then switched to Dutch when it was clear I had no idea what they said.  No one seemed to speak much English but language was no barrier to enjoying the sights.  There was food and drinks available but I would highly recommend you take your own in a backpack.  The prices were extremely high, especially the drinks; 1.50 Euros for about a four ounce sip.  The ice cream was very good and reasonably priced; 1.40 Euro for a good sized cone.  There were lots of places where you could sit and enjoy your own snacks.

I made two loops around the feest in four and a half hours.  The church (interior) in the village is one of the prettiest small churches I have ever seen in The Netherlands (and I have seen a lot of them).  There was an organ recital going on when I was in it and the organist was very good.  He was accompanied by a male signer/chanter and he was also very good.

I have been to a lot of small town events here in the past two years and I have to say this was the most interesting one so far.  There was a lot of stuff I had little interest in (sewing machines, wool spinning, face painting) and glanced at and moved on and I still had plenty to see.  I took plenty of pictures and you can see those below:

There were a couple displays of bicycles and motorized bikes.  The motorized bikes in the picture to the left were mostly from the 1950's.  Some looked practical and others looked like they would be hard to steer.  The bike to the right is a two-wheel drive bike.  You pump the handlebars up and down and that drives the front wheel.  There is a chain from the handlebars to the front sprocket.  Click on the picture to make it larger and you will see this.  I think that would be a difficult way to ride a bike but I guess it might help in the snow?

This bike is supposed to be a bicycle plow.  Look under the frame and you will see a small plow.  That would be some tough peddling I think.

There was a dog-cart treking club showing their dogs and carts.  I think there were five or six different dog carts.  The dogs are all very large breeds and some of the carts looked like they must have weighed well over a hundred pounds.  It was a warm afternoon so the dogs had to rest after a loop around the feest.  One of the carts was a cage of sorts with another dog being hauled around in it.  They were very well behaved and largely ignored pets that were walking around on a leash.

There were two different goat carts (geit kar) rolling through the area.  The goats had full horns on them and looked kind of wild and devilish.  When they took up a trot they could move pretty fast.  Goat carts were very common on smaller farms to haul produce to market.

There were several large displays of hand tools.  Most of them I was familiar with but a couple I had never seen before.  The only one that I had no clue what it was or what it was for I saw being used at another location and that solved that riddle.  The Dutch have an amazing variety of digging tools.  The different soil types, peat digging, and various farming techniques have led to this variety. The oicture to the right shows three tools used to hang cooking pots in a hearth.  The saw teeth are used to adjust the height of the pot above the fire.

With all the canals, dikes, and river banks, trapping burrowing animals was extremely important.  Too many burrows and a dike (dijk) would fail causing a disaster.  I am not sure how they manage problem animals in today's world where trapping is seen as barbaric.  I would guess they have to resort to poison.  Relocation of animals just transfers a problem from one area to another so that cannot be a solution.



Reaper

Thresher

Winnower



Small Stationary Engine

This series of photos shows the process of reaping, threshing, winnowing, and then grinding. The horse-drawn reaper (or harvester) was working a 3-5 acre field. It broke down a couple times but they managed to harvest most of the field by the time I left. The Thresher was driven by a tractor pully and belt but back in the day there would have been a stationary engine providing the power.  A Thresher separates the grain from the straw. The winnower was hand-cranked. A Winnower separates the grain from the chaff. The last step is to grind the grain into flour.  This step is done by a Grist Mill.  The small stationary steam engine shown here was used to cook a chicken on a rotisserie grill but is the type that would have been used to turn a small grist mill.  If the farmer had large quantities of grain to grind he would take it to a proper mill run by wind or water power.

This linear sawmill was cutting trees into approximately 4x6 and 5x8 inch timbers.  There was a tractor running a generator off its power take-off to provide electricity to the mill's motors.  It was not an exceptionally fast mill but linear mills generally aren't.  But it got the job done just as well.



Rope Making



Duck Man leading his ducks

 Ducks were important farm animals years ago.  Besides providing eggs and meat for the family and market, ducks were used as insect control in gardens and large vegetable patches.  They would eat slugs and bugs without touching the plants themselves.  Much better than insecticides.





Decorative Wheat Fans



Washing Laundry the Old Way

Washday was a dreaded event I am sure.  Hot water and lye-based soaps must have been hard on the hands.  In the winter, farm women often did sewing and crafts to bring in a little extra money.  Corn and wheat plants were often used.



For farms that couldn't afford a stationary engine the farmers would use horse power to run their machinery.  This apparatus could be driven by two horses and it turned a shaft that was linked to a silage cutter operated by the man in this picture. Silage is chopped corn, stalks and all, that is sweetened with molasses and then packed in air-tight piles to ferment.  It keeps for years and is a favored, high protein feed.  The ladder in the lower picture is labled in Limburgs dialect.  If you pronounce it correcly it sounds just like "Silage Ladder", which is what it is.

So that's it.  It was a long day but well worth the five Euro price. Mark it on your calendar for next year.