Publisher's Post - June 2024

Having spent most of March and April relocating our office, warehouse and shipping department, buying a house, moving there, and getting our old house ready for sale, I haven’t spent as much time on the road as I usually do.

One of the trips I did take was to Lancaster, Penn., where I spent a morning with Arthur Reist, who is the fifth generation of Reists to live at Oaklawn Farm on Eden Road.

Arthur is an avid collector. He seeks out pieces that tell the story of early European pioneers settling in the eastern U.S. He has barns packed with tools, vehicles, equipment and accessories from several centuries ago. But even more than the physical objects he has displayed, Arthur loves to collect stories about them and share those stories with others.

Visiting with him, I am perpetually having to steer him back to the topic we’d been discussing — whether it be horseshoeing, tobacco farming, barn building or early masonry, for example — as he veers away when another thought strikes him. And it can be hard to do that corrective steering, because just about everything he talks about is fascinating to me.

A natural-born teacher, Arthur gives tours of his tool and antique vehicle collection to schoolchildren. He will lift up a tool and ask “do you know what this has no idea. Then he’d demonstrate how the tool worked. He especially likes to collect and talk about tools designed to make other tools that then, in turn, were used to make something else — like a barrel stave or a wheel felloe, for instance.

I particularly enjoyed accompanying Arthur to a few of his neighbors’ old barns. We’d be walking into the forebay of a barn, and Arthur would spot a notch in a wall or and explain it was to help the farmer make the first step of a ladder, long since removed. He’d find the remnants of a machine, buried among other pieces of discarded lumber, pull it out and show how it worked and, even more interesting, how it fit into the operation of the barn system at that particular farm.

A Rural Heritage on RFD-TV episode about Arthur and his collection will air in September. — jm

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