Rockville Museum’s Easter Steam-Up
Penny Griffith serving tea and scones at Rockville Museum’s Pioneer Kitchen last Sunday. Assisting (on right) is Pat Davies. Photo: Gerard Hindmarsh.
Patchy, sometimes heavy rain did not deter a good steady crowd from attending Rockville Museum’s annual Easter Steam Up last Sunday between 10am and 3pm.
The action was largely concentrated inside the museum building anyway, where the stationary engines were cranked up to become the usual star exhibits.
Two Anderson boilers run around half-a-dozen steam-powered machines on display at Rockville. There’s also vintage tractors and farm machinery, a dairy, a blacksmith and hospital memorabilia sections. Also popular last Sunday were the DVD screenings of the 2010 Great Dorset Steam Fair, which featured the 1877 McLaren traction engine that was used by Grant’s Sawmill at Rockville and returned to England specially for that event.
A sing-along choir from the Stoke Old Time Country Music Club provided the entertainment for the day, brought along by Carol Wells of East Takaka, at whose place they were all parked up for the weekend. On the melodious piano (ex East Takaka Hall) was Grant Marshall of Richmond.
Steam Up days are the very public side of the more properly named Golden Bay Machinery and Settlers Museum at Rockville. Money raised for the museum has always come from grants, door donations and Steam-Up Days, including the selling of teas, scones and sausages from its pioneer kitchen. Nearly three years ago, volunteers spent the whole winter painstakingly removing the deteriorating, thick double-layer cork insulation from the walls of what used to be the inner room or cool store of the one-time Collingwood Dairy Factory. This space now houses the museum’s early settler treasures. Absolutely unique are two wooden 3D local landscape scenes made to look like framed paintings, done by an old Collingwood miner named Biggs. He even incorporated the swirling grain of a punga tree into his remarkable inlays.
Gerard Hindmarsh
