We went to Alexander,Ny last Friday evening,there's a steam engine club down that way and their annual show was last weekend.We didn't get down there until about 5:00 so we really didn't have enough time to see everything.I wanted to look for parts,so we hit the flea market vendors and the engines and skipped most of the tractors.It was a real nice show,laid out and organized very well,I wish I would have had a few more hours to look around.I like old small engines the best and they had quite a few nice ones on display.Most were Maytags but there was a Johnson Utilimotor and an Elgin Half a Hors that are a lot rarer than the Maytags,both were used on washing machines.There were a few upright Maytags and a nice model 82 also a bicycle that had a Maytag twin on it to power it.Those guys down there build all sorts of buggies for riding around on.There was another motor than I haven't identified yet,the one with the 2 flywheels,the 82 Maytag is the green one with the cylinderpainted black,it also has a brass carburator on it,the blue engine next to it is the utilimotor,then a couple of real nice stoveleg Maytags,these are the earliest engines Maytag built,then the Elgin with the covered flywheel and I'm not sure,I think the last one is a Maytag but Johnson also built an engine very similar,I'm not sure which it is.

 

I'm kind of on a roll today,so before I lose my train of thought,I'm going to try to put some of it down here.I grew up in an area of PA that gets a lot of different reactions from people when you tell them the name,Nescopeck.Nescopeck is along the Susquehanna River,as you travel north along the river,you come to Wapwallopen,Mocanaqua,Shickshinny and Nanticoke.The names come from the Indians that inhabited the area and in colonial America this was part of the original wilderness.The first settlers came up the river from he Northumberland area or down the river from the Wilkes Barre area,both Pennsylvania and Connecticut were laying claim to the land and trying to get people to settle there.Nescopeck had settlers in the 1790s but most of the surounding areas weren't settled until the 1800s.I started reading a late 1800s account of how the are was settled late last winter and I'm hoping to get back to it before too long but it's hard to imagine the problems that the people encountered and stories that have been passed down over the years either get blown out of proportion,watered down or completely forgotten.Getting back to the Indians,the towns that are there are on land that originally had Indian settlements,most were of the Iroquois nation and pieceful but there were some that weren't,I wish I new more about them but Indian history has never been something that I had much interest in.One more tidbit,in my pictures,there is an album of Wapwallopen,if you look at the pictures you'll see Council Cup,that was suppose to be where the Indians held their great Pow Wows,one of these days,I want to get back up to the top and get some pictures from up there,the view of the river is spectacular,there is an overlook up there that you can get to without too much trouble,on a good day you can see 20 or 30 miles of the river.

I was coming down from the area above the tressle and the power house while I was in the Powder Hole the other weekend and a doe crossed aout 20 yards in front of me,I was not in a good position to get any pictures and thought I had missed that opertunity but I decided to move slowly and see,once I got to the bottom,if I could get another chance.Well I guess,as Toby Keith would say,I'm not as good as I once was but I'm as good once as I ever was,when Igot to the bottom,her and a fawn were still there just a few yards farther away.Unfortunatly,the camera that I was using wasn't quite up to task for the stills that I took but I did get a minute of video that came out pretty good  

We were in Pennsylvania a couple of weekends ago for a family reunion,I've been wanting to take some pictures of the old Dupont Powder Co plant along the Little Wapwallopen Creek just a couple miles upriver from Nescopeck.I've been wanting to get down there all summer long but every time we're in PA I'm either to busy or the weather is bad.This weekend on Sunday morning,the weather was great so I made the trek down there,it really isn't that bad,the trail is pretty nice although recent storms have taken it's toll on some pretty nice hardwood and a few large Sycamore trees.There are files in my public folders from a Bucknell University professor that give a pretty detailed description of the powder works.It's always been an area that fascinated me as a young boy,some of the older boys would talk about grave markers in he church cemetary that mark the graves of a few of the people killed in explosions at the plant.As a teeager we hiked and swam and partied along the creek and especially at the falls,there have been a few people hurt and a couple years back,a young fellow from up river drowned,it's still a pretty popular place even though most of it is on private property.I was glad I got a chance to get down there,there are still more pictures that I want to take but it's been 10 years since I was down there last,hopefully it won't take that long to get back again.Time  and a few floods in the past 35 years have changed the scenery,in the one picture,the rusted metal pipe was the intake pipe for a waterwheel,you used to be able to walk up the pipe to get to the next leg of the trail along the creek,there are 2 more sets of smaller falls farther up stream but as you can see now,you can't anymore and getting to the upper part of the trail is pretty roundabout. 

This past weekend was one of the best balloon festivals in the northeast US.I really don't have any words to descibe it,the weather was great,enjoy.