Engines that powered oil, gas industry on display

The quiet Jefferson County village of Coolspring was anything but quiet Saturday. It was an open weekend for the Coolspring Power Museum and that meant that the largest collection of internal combustion engines in the world were humming.

The Power Museum presents a history of industrial internal combustion engines. Engines in the museum’s collection range in size from fractional horsepower up to 600 horsepower.

Wayne Grenning, a longtime volunteer at the museum, said the museum contains the “largest collection of historically significant, early stationary gas engines in the country, if the not the world.”

The collection consists primarily of engines built in America because that is what was available to the museum. However, the technology on which they are based comes from both sides of the Atlantic.

“The Coolspring Power Museum really started out as Dr. Paul Harvey’s private collection of engines,” said museum volunteer Mike Monnier. “He merged his collection with a friend and they started it at the Harvey family farm. It started out as a gathering of friends. In the early 1980s they decided to incorporate it as a museum. It is a place where people can come and learn about these engines and see the history of the internal combustion engine.”

Many of the engines are sometimes called “hit-and-miss engines.”

“The hit-and-miss name comes from the way the engines operate,” he said. “When the engine fires and if the engine wasn’t under a load it would miss. It wouldn’t fire every time.”

Today the engines don’t use gasoline or diesel. “Most of the engines run on natural gas but a few run on hydrogen,” said Monnier.

Many of the engines powered Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industry. “Some of the engines on display were used in oil fields, some powered factories and other smaller ones were used on farms. Several of the engines were used to produce electricity,” he said.

Many of the engines were rescued from the scrap heap. “In the 1960s you were able to find quite a few of the engines but they started to become scarce in the 1990s,” said Monnier.

For Jonathan Biers the engines at the museum are personal.

“My dad ran the Turner-Frick engines for standby power at Royston,” said Jonathan Biers, a retired Navy civil employee. “That was important to our family finances because every time one went out, he had to get it started because they ran the power for the water pumps. He got paid for four hours at time and half.

“When the company decided to replace the old engines he met Dr. Paul Harvey, the founder of the power museum. Dr. Harvey collected engines for his own collection at that time,” said Biers. “At that time no one ever heard of collecting old engines. Doc came up and bought one of the engines.”

Biers recalled that at that time there were only three or four buildings at the power museum. Today there are 30 buildings.

Biers is impressed by the number of international visitors the museum receives. “I was down here in 2014 and there was announcement asking anyone from outside the United States to meet for a photo. There were over 100 people in that photo,” he said.

The museum remains popular not only with engine fans but also the general public.

“This museum teaches,” said Biers. “Here you can learn about the industrial revolution.”