COLCHESTER, Ill. — Hundreds of visitors enjoyed the Argyle Antique Gas Engine Show in picturesque Argyle Lake State Park in west-central Illinois. The show coincides with an annual weekend-long Labor Day celebration in nearby Colchester that draws thousands for craft vendors, yard sales, musical acts and midway rides.

What is now the Argyle Antique Gas Engine Show was originally a simple gathering of four families who brought examples of their farms’ old flywheel engines to show off at Colchester Days. After a few years, they were invited by the park ranger to use the state park and expand.

That was in 1976, and they’ve held a show there every year since, displaying farm tractors, threshing and baling machinery and many of the small two- and four-cycle engines that toiled on farms for several decades until rural electrification arrived a decade or two into the 20th century.

Most manufacturers of these “little chuggers” stopped making them by 1940. They were simple but cleverly designed machines, able to run for a full day on 1-1.5 gallons of gasoline or kerosene. The cost, other than wear and tear, was only about a nickel (gasoline cost about 3 cents a gallon, and kerosene was 2 cents).

They were more limited than gas-powered tractors that came along later. Most gas engines stayed in one spot, such as the barn or shed, or had to be pulled by horse if needed in the field to take over for the windmill or to cut branches. Some were equipped with wheels, but many had none and would be loaded on a trailer or bolted to a skid to become mobile.

These engines also were limited by horsepower. The larger models might reach 10 hp, but most farmers had models with 1.5, 3 or 6 hp. But that was enough to free the farmer, his hired help or his family from much manual labor that had been the norm:

•A washing machine with a belt on the side could be hooked to a gas engine sitting nearby to churn the clothes or bedding while the woman of the house attended to other chores

•Smaller hay balers and wheat threshers could be powered by a mid-size flywheel engine, until the arrival of tractors provided much more horsepower and threshing equipment could get bigger and handle more wheat at a time

•Gas engines supplied the constant turning needed to thresh grains or animal feed in a granary; in that same vein, a grindstone in a shed could be spun rapidly by a gas engine to help someone sharpen blades on knives, scythes and other garden tools, and for saws and plows

•They also powered corn shellers, small buzz saws or hack saws

“And whenever your windmill wasn’t turning (to pump water), you had to take this to it in the pasture, belt it up and pump water that way,” said Mike Camerer of Greenville, Ill., who brought five of his 20-25 restored engines to the show at Argyle Lake.

Camerer had a 1.5-hp International gas engine fired up Aug. 31 at the show, with a belt running between the engine and a nearby hack saw. He was cutting an aluminum rod of about 2 inches diameter into 1/8-inch-thick wafers, to which he then added a youngster’s name, drilled a hole to thread a colorful string through it and turned it into a lanyard. Young visitors to the show dropped by frequently checking to see how soon the next “coin” was going to be created.

He was one of three collectors who brought several gas engines to the show near Colchester. Much more plentiful were the tractors on display at the event. Minneapolis-Moline models were featured this year, and the “poster child” was the unusual-looking Model R from 1939, its first year of production.

Unlike most tractors of that era, the R offered an optional enclosed steel cab over the seat, controls and steering wheel – or at least it appeared to be enclosed when seen from the front or sides. The cab was actually open on the back, and the seat and steering wheel were on the left (as in an automobile) instead of centered directly behind the engine like most tractors.

The 1939 Model R highlighting the show is owned by Deb and Jim Hurt of Augusta, Ill. Deb said riding in it is one of her early memories.

“He (my father) bought it the year I was born, and he used to put me in beside him in a basket, and he’d cultivate the fields,” she said. The tractor was put out to pasture in 1975, and her husband and some friends restored it beginning in 2009.

As the featured tractor in the show, it led off the parade of tractors each day of the event, with all the other Minneapolis-Molines following close behind before tractors of other makes made their way through the parade route.

For those not interested in the farm heritage aspects of a show like this, a large number of vendors set up tables in a nearby field, creating a flea market large enough to keep youngsters and other visitors busy for hours.