511 East Main Street, Evansvill, Wisconsin
Fuller and Johnson, Baker Monitor, Cushman, Reo, Hercules,
Fairbanks.
Do they sound familiar? Maybe rock and roll groups from the
sixties? No, they’re stationary gasoline engines that were
common in rural areas fifty or more years ago.
These names and archaic terms like priming cup, vibrator coil,
low-tension ignition, hit and miss governor, jump spark igniter,
and hot shot battery are all guaranteed to quicken the pulse of
anyone who worked around those old engines or is an antique engine
buff.
Roy E. Sarow of Evansville, Wisconsin is both. He says,
‘They were used for grinding feed, pumping water, sawing wood,
running washing machines, and other farm chores that electric
motors do today.’ He has an impressive stable of them in
show-room condition.
Kept in a room adjacent to the work shop back of his home on
Walker Street, each is mounted on its own wheeled platform ready to
be rolled forward for closer inspection.
A Baker Monitor and a Fuller and Johnson are of special interest
because they were made locally. The latter is unique in that it
cranks to the left to right. Both are complete with jacks and old
fashioned up-right pumps.
The Baker plant is two blocks from Sarow’s home and the
Fuller and Johnson works was less than twenty-five miles away.
Fuller and Johnson was a victim of the Depression but Baker
Manufacturing Company is alive and well. It presently makes pitless
water well systems, oil field pumping units, and the familiar
drinking fountain type hand pumps found in parks and rest areas
across the United States and Canada.
Baker’s employee profit sharing plan, the first in America,
dates back to 1899. The company celebrated its centennial in
1973.
These old engines, slow and heavy were made in an era when
things were built to last and planned obsolescence hadn’t
become a way of life for manufacturers. They didn’t wear out
easily.
For someone like Sarow who understands the functions of all
their components, it’s possible to rebuild them so they run
like new. If parts are missing and replacements can’t be
located, he makes them.
Born and raised on a farm, Sarow attended auto mechanic classes
for two winters at the old Janesville Vocational School. There he
learned to bore engine blocks, rebabbit bearings, build batteries,
fit wrist pins, scrape connecting rod bearings, and many other
skills seldom used today. He started working in a garage in 1927
and, except for a stint in the hardware business, stayed in
automobile servicing and merchandising until retiring in 1971.
In his shop was a 1.5 horsepower one cylinder John Deere and a
1.25 horsepower one-cylinder Baker Monitor upright engine
glistening with new paint. He cranked them both. They started
immediately and ran beautifully. Two Maytags were being
reconditioned, one a single cylinder horizontal, the other a
two-cylinder horizontal ‘Multi-Motor.’ Waiting its turn was
an old upright Briggs and Stratton FH with overhead valves, an
unusual model.
Sarow patted the Baker Monitor and said, ‘These were real
farm engines. Everything was simple and strong. This one even has a
cast iron gas tank.’
‘When I was a boy, we had a Baker engine that pumped water
for a stock tank down on the marsh. When the stock was on pasture,
one of us would go down there each morning, put in a quart of
gasoline, start the engine and leave. When it ran out of gas, the
stock tank would be full. All the old engines were built to
function with little maintenance. They were made to run for hours
or even days unattended, exposed to all kinds of weather.’
Has he ever used his engines?
‘I have an old burr mill powered by a one cylinder Reo. I
use this to grind corn for bird feed and by setting it to grind
finer, I make wheat into flour and corn into meal for johnny
cake.’
‘My respect for and interest in old motors was revived in
1973 when several other Trout Unlimited members and I received
permission to use a city-owned 50-year-old pumping rig, if we could
get it back into operating condition, on a stream project north of
Evansville. It consisted of a single cylinder horizontal gas engine
and two big pitcher pumps mounted on a trailer. We had to make
extensive repairs on both the engine and pumps before the unit was
usable.’
Trout Unlimited is a club devoted to preserving and restoring
trout habitat.
‘The old pump sat on the stream bank and ran weekend after
weekend sucking silt, sticks and other debris out of a big spring
hole. Occasionally a stone would be drawn into one of the pumps and
hold a valve open. We would shut down long enough to remove that,
but the old engine never faltered.’ Sarow recalls.
After that he began acquiring and renovating old gas
engines.
He finds them in farm yards, barns and sheds around the country
side. Most of them are covered with rust and few are complete or
operable when he gets them.
Each one is dismantled, cleaned, inspected, reconditioned, then
painted its original color. Even ascertaining the correct paint
color can involve extensive research.
He doesn’t operate a museum as such, but visitors are
welcome and as word gets around more and more people are stopping
to see the ‘old fashioned engines that run.’ He has put
together a slide program on the engines that he shows to clubs,
schools, senior citizen groups, and historical society meetings.
These have all brought leads that have resulted in his locating
other engines.
A feature story in a Madison, Wisconsin newspaper about his
collection brought a deluge of letters and calls in addition to
more visitors. One was from a University of Wisconsin professor who
wondered if Sarow would be interested in an old engine that had to
be removed from some property the professor had recently
inherited.
He and a friend went to see the engine and found it rusting away
in the remains of an old pump house. It was something different
than either had seen before so Sarow made an offer that was
accepted. After unbolting it from the pump, which the owner wanted
to keep, and sliding it out into the light, they found a tag
identifying it as a Fuller and Johnson ‘Farm Pump Engine,’
serial number 39518, patented in 1909.
Later research ascertained it had been made in 1914 and was
rated at 1.5 horsepower.
This is the Fuller and Johnson farm pump engine Roy acquired as
the result of a feature about his collection in a metropolitan
newspaper.
Now, after a thorough refurbishing, it’s one of the
highlights of his collection. A model rarely seen at shows, its air
cooled cylinder is in marked contrast with the water hoppers of
comparable engines, and the left hand crank intrigues visitors.
He also has a 2 horsepower type NB Fuller and Johnson made in
1927 and a 2.5 horsepower type NC made in 1929. Lampblack added to
New Idea green gives him the original Fuller and Johnson color.
Why does he do all this? ‘Well,’ he says with a grin,
‘For me, working with old machines must be kind of therapeutic.
I retired because of ill health, and although I am probably as busy
as when I was working, I feel better than I have for years.
Besides, I meet a lot of nice people.’
