Listing Through Life

While my wife shopped in downtown Shipshewana, I searched for something more to my taste. I discovered an antique auto museum tucked into a corner of an event center. When I arrived, it was only 45 minutes to closing, but I was just passing the time anyway, so it didn’t matter. As it turned out, it was one of the most enjoyable museums I’ve ever visited.

The cars were stunning. I took photos of almost every one, but I’ll only post my favorites. Even so, this will be a long post if you’re not into old cars.

1910 Hudson Touring Car.

1915 Hudson Six-40. Blue was the only color available.

1928 Hudson 4-Door Town Car. It was custom built for the wife of a patent medicine maker in Columbus, Ohio and was only driven by a chauffeur.

1929 Hudson Essex Speedabout, Boat-tail. This is one of my favorites in the museum. The body is aluminum and only five were made.

1929 Hudson R Convertible Coupe.

1929 Hudson Dual Cowl, Four Door, Sport Phaeton. I’m not a big fan of of the color scheme, but the lines are beautiful. Only seventeen were produced and only seven are left.

1929 Hudson L Club Sedan. This is the longest and heaviest car Hudson ever made. The company that built the body, Biddle & Smart, specialized in horse-drawn hearses.

1931 Hudson. This is another of my favorites. This particular car was given to President Herbert Hoover by Hudson president Roy Chafin (who was Secretary of Commerce at the time) to use in Panama during a conference with Latin American leaders. The car was left in Panama and used as a taxi for several years before being returned to the United States and restored.

1931 Hudson T Sports Roadster. Another boat-tail model with a rumble seat.

1933 Hudson Terraplane Convertible. This model set several hill-climbing records.

1933 Hudson Terraplane Flower Car.

1936 Hudson Series 65 Convertible Coupe. I hate the color but found the styling impressive. The front-opening doors were called “suicide doors.” I’m not sure why.

1937 Hudson Terraplane Four Door Sedan. This model got 21.08 miles per gallon at an average speed of 86.54 mph. And it had a “bubble trunk.”

1937 Hudson Custom Eight.

1937 Railton with a Hudson Eight-Cylinder Chassis. Railton was a distributor of Hudson cars in England. The body was made by Ranalah Coachworks in Wimble, England.

1937 Hudson Terraplane Pick-Up Express. The bed would hold a 4’x8′ sheet of plywood.

1940 Hudson Traveler Business Coupe. Another of my favorites. Note the truck body that slides out of the trunk.

1942 Hudson Wood-bodied Station Wagon. This particular car was discovered moldering on a mountain top above Death Valley, California. A bulldozer had to be used to cut a path to bring it down. It needed extensive restoration.

An unrestored Woody Wagon for comparison.

1946 Hudson Super Six Brougham Convertible.

1947 Hudson Super Six Two-Door.

1948 Hudson Super Six Four Door. It featured a “step down” design which means that the car was built inside the frame instead of on top of it. All cars are now built this way. This car was featured in one of the earliest TV advertisement campaigns.

1951 Hudson Broughman Convertible Parade Car. I think they got a little carried away with the hood ornament and the rear bumper.

1951 Hudson Convertible. Only 550 of these cars were manufactured.

1953 Hudson Super Wasp Hollywood.

1956 Hudson Hornet Sedan. In 1953, Hudson and Nash combined to form American Motors. The Hudson name was dropped in 1957.

An overview of the museum. The three vehicles closest to the camera are a 1947 Hudson Pickup Long Boy, a 1952 Hudson Hornet Pickup and a 1927 Hudson Fire Engine built on a limousine chassis.

For most of my visit, I had the museum to myself. Another couple came in shortly before closing time. When I left, the doors were locked, but the woman behind the counter graciously allowed me to go back in with the red chair and take a few more photos.

My wife has a friend who keeps insisting that she has to visit Shipshewana. So we did. Our first stop was the Menno-Hof, a museum about the Amish and Mennonite people, created and operated by Amish and Mennonite people. We went expecting to be preached at. What we didn’t expect was to be preached at for two hours and 15 minutes. It threw off our whole day’s schedule and got rather annoying before it was over.

The museum consists of a series of small rooms to which we were conducted by a guide and in which we saw videos and other displays about the history of the Anabaptists. In short, these were people who broke away from the main line churches because they didn’t believe in infant baptism. Down the road of history, the group splintered into the Amish, the Hutterites and the Mennonites.

The video rooms were followed by a self-guided section that repeated a great deal of what we’d just seen and heard, and then repeated it again.

At the end of this room, we were met by another guide who proceeded to give us a 10-minute lecture on the making of a quilt that featured squares from all the various countries in which the Mennonites have missionaries. Then we went to the “Tornado Room,” which gave a brief history of a tornado that hit the Shipshewana area in 1965 and and endless recitation of all the different places hit by disasters to which the Mennonites have sent relief. This was followed by another room in which a Mennonite church service was demonstrated. We were finally let out into a self-guided area about a famous Amish dude, but we walked straight through it and left as quickly as we could.

Bottom line, these fine folk are no doubt sincere and saved. But they have no understanding of progressive revelation and seem to have substituted the tyranny of the pope for a subtler tyranny by the elders. They don’t come right out and say that you have to do works to be saved, but they do say that you have to be a committed member of a local church, which involves obedience to the elders.

 

I’m a bit unclear on where they draw the lines. We spotted two teenage girls in full Amish get-up sitting in a buggy looking at at cell phone, and I saw an Amish guy texting while driving his buggy down the road. But the main issue I have with them is that they claim to be living separated lives while at the same time deliberately making of themselves a tourist attraction to make money.

And that’s what Shipshewana is. An Amish tourist trap. The stores sell Amish-made furniture, the restaurants serve Amish food. You can even take a ride in an Amish-style buggy driven by a guy wearing Amish-style clothing which will take you to an Amish home for an Amish dinner. We passed.

My wife shopped for birdhouses in the cutesy downtown shopping area. I went to the event center and toured an antique car museum (next post). We met up after an hour to get pretzels. And let me tell you — the pretzels are worth the trip all by themselves.

We bought one with cinnamon and sugar and one “original.” The cinnamon and sugar was very, very good. The original was the best pretzel I’ve ever had and probably makes the list of 100 best foods I’ve eaten. If I had such a list.

We might have stuck around a bit longer and looked around more, but the whole town closed at 5:00 and, thanks to the interminable visit to the Menno-Hof, it was already that late.

We took back roads out of town and passed by an Amish softball game and several other community get-togethers.

Right outside the small town of Kendallville, Indiana there’s a field full of windmills. Not the huge ones like they have in Holland but small ones, like you see on farms. It so happens that windmills were manufactured in Kendallville and in dozens of other small towns in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.

They all had signs written by windmill enthusiasts for windmill enthusiasts that said things like “The mill was self-oiling with bronze bearings in place of Timken roller bearings and a single back-gear in place of the normal two gears.” But we read most of them anyway and even figured out what some of them meant. I’ve included descriptions for a couple of them.

For me, the main appeal was the history and the spectacle of dozens of windmills in one small field. Here, in no particular order, is what we saw.

The next two photos are of the Dempster Eclipse Model No. 9, built between 1908 to 1925.

The next mill is the Flint & Walling Model 26, built of wood for farmers who didn’t like the noise made by metal mills.

The red, white and blue mill is the Fairbanks Morse Eclipse Type WG, built from 1926 to 1935.

 

The yellow and red windmill is the Fairbanks Morse Eclipse, invented in 1867 by a reverend. It was the most common windmill before metal ones were manufactured.

 

The Challenge OK, built by the Challenge Windmill and Feed Company of Batavia, Illinois before 1914.

This next one is a reproduction of a Robertson Post Windmill based on plans of a 17th-century mill in Cambridgeshire, England. Mills of this type were used in the Mid-Atlantic states. The mill was turned into the wind by pushing a sloping tail pole that extends from the rear of the cabin.

Inside the Robertson Post Mill.

There were a few more displays inside the barn/visitor center.

 

The Fairbury Mini-Mill was built as a yard or garden decoration. It was a working windmill that pumped water just like a regular windmill. They were made until the early 1960s and cost $75.

We had a bit of hard time leaving. The older gentleman who was volunteering in the office was very enthusiastic and wouldn’t let us leave until he pointed out each picture on the wall and each display in the barn. He had us watch a goofy video that was mostly about water mills and only briefly mentioned the type of windmills on display at the museum, even though the video was made exclusively for the museum. It goes to show that there isn’t anything that somebody doesn’t find fascinating, and this specialty museum was much better presented than most.