The Campbell Carriage
Factory Museum is on Church Street in Sackville, New
Brunswick.
Liam at the Carriage House Museum |
It's the only carriage
manufacturing museum left in Canada. And the crazy thing is, when this company
closed its doors in 1951 it wasn't reopened until the 1980s and, according to Liam, "Nothing had
been touched. It was like everybody just walked off the
job and left things as they were."
Liam, 23, took me on
tour and pointed out some of the unique wooden wheel making
equipment. He said in
the 80s antique dealers came in and bought a lot of the items. "The thing
is, they didn't really even know the carriage business so they took what they
knew - hammers and chisels and stuff. But what they left were the really
valuable tools like this," said Liam, holding up a large metal pliers that looked
like it could pull a tooth.
"This was used to
help straighten the spokes and pull them into place on a wooden
wheel." I asked what it was called
and Liam said he didn't know the technical name but he called it the
"spoke straightener."
The carriage factory
also built caskets. Above is a
collection of hardware used
to decorate the caskets.
There were two floors to
the shop. Pieces of the carriage were hand-crafted on the first floor and
assembled and painted on the second. "It's odd they would move the
finished product a level up because then they had to get it down," said Liam.
"But because they had to paint it and dust would fall to the level below they
had the paint department on the second floor."
The door of the paint
shop was used as a pallet to test the viscosity of the paint since only white
paint was available and all colors had to be mixed by hand. "So this raised rough glop is over 100
years of paint being thrown onto the door to see if the paint was the right
consistency," said Liam.
In its heyday, the
Carriage factory employed about 16 people. Liam said a single 4-horse engine
ran the turbine for all the equipment. "It was so loud in this part of the
building that the craftsmen had to talk to each other using a form of sign
language.
The Campbell Carriage
Factory Museum is now run as a museum and receives federal funding.
For a full history of the museum, click HERE.
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