Soule Live Steam Festival 2011

I got up this morning and walked the dogs aware of the brisk chill in the air.  The weather meant it would be a perfect morning to catch the steam coming off the engines at a festival I'd been waiting for since I left it last year.  The Live Steam Festival would start in a few hours.

As I walked down from my parking place, I could hear the full-throated scream of the whistles mounted on the roof of the old factory, the rhythmic thumping of the big steam engines, and a new sound added to the mix this year, the merry singing of multiple carousel organs scattered throughout.  Plumes of white smoke and steam curled up into the sky and a pleasant smell burning wood hung in the air.

I saw many of the same engines there this year as last, and I focused on trying to capture them in new ways.  I used my new Diana lens to get some different angles on them, and then I went inside.  The Industrial Heritage Museum folks have done massive amounts of work on their buildings, cleaning out and building new structures inside.  It is wonderful how nice the place looks.  They have added little "shops" inside one of the buildings to showcase crafts like broom making, pottery, weaving, and have also taken all the materials from the print shop that so fascinated me before and set up a working printing press from the factory's belt drive.

A gentleman was printing Marks-Rothenberg ads today as a demonstration, and I talked with him just a bit about the process and took a couple of pictures.  He let me have one of the printed pieces.  It tickled me to no end.  Marks-Rothenberg is one of my special places and always will be whether it is the department store of memory in which I rode the elevator with that wonderful lady who was kind enough to put up with me when I was an overly-inquisitive child who asked too many questions while my mother shopped or whether it is the MSU Riley Center of today where I can go and see wonderful performances like Macbeth the other night.

I walked over and looked at the trains at the depot this year, and I sort of wish I hadn't for two reasons.  First, I saw what is left of the New Orleans and Crescent.  It was a tattered and fading exhibition with peeling paint and shattered glass.  It made me feel sad.  It feels too much like so many other things in town, a glorious and proud past that is disappearing.  Second, it struck me that "Whistlestop" part of the weekend could have been so much more.  Aren't there train groups out there that could bring in something fabulous the way the other groups involved have done?  It needed a little more work.  Amtrak had an engine on the tracks, but that was all.

One thing that was new and really fabulous was all the carousel organs.  They were just frilly and fantastic.  Everywhere you went in a two block radius and inside the building proper itself, they were sitting on corners and in open spaces filling the air with their glorious sound.  Some were hand-cranked and small enough to roll.  Some were so giant that they were an entire vehicle themselves.  Some were very old.  Some were made in the last twenty years or so in some guy's garage.  All of them made me smile in delight.  I love the sound of a carousel organ.  I have fervently wished the one in our local Dentzel were restored.  The recordings they have on CD are, I'm sure, very convenient, but it's just not the same as hearing the real thing.

I hope they continue to have the Carousel Organ Association come down and be a part of the Live Steam weekend.  It seems that they are a natural offshoot to me. It would be grand, in fact, if more things related to steampower wound up being centered on this festival.  Going back to what I said about the trains, I'd love to see some of the gorgeous steam engines come into Meridian somehow.  To me, it would be a resurrection of what Meridian used to be when she was at her best.  I don't know what kind of finagling that would involve, but maybe, someday, it could be possible.