Our collection includes a number of gas and oil engines, housed in a dedicated building, and dating from 1900 to the early 1940’s. They are representatives of noted manufacturers such as Atlas, Otto, Fairbanks-Morse, De Laverne, Clark, Ohio, Geiser, Reid and others. There are about fifteen of these engines on display, most in running condition.

The image below is a 360′ panorama photosphere of our Gas Engine Museum.
Using your mouse you can drag the view all around, and zoom using your mouse wheel.
The black square in the upper right changes the view to full screen.

Our Rural Life Museum is dedicated to preserving the “living” side of the culture. Most of the items have been donated by members and others who are interested in the preservation of their links to the past. The museum features a typical Eastern Shore farm house kitchen furnished with items from the period 1900 to the 1930’s. The Museum also features a General Store as it would have existed in this area in the early 1900’s, displays of hand tools that were in use by farmers and craftsmen, memorabilia from the time that Steamships were a primary mode of transportation on the Shore, and much more.

We have a large variety of antique farm machinery and horse-drawn equipment all fully restored and in working condition.

The Tuckahoe Machine Shop Museum is a working exhibition housed in a 4,000 square foot building which opened in 2008. Here, volunteers preserve, restore, and demonstrate early line shaft driven machine tools, and provide machining services for the restoration of Tuckahoe’s collections of antique steam and internal combustion engines and tractors.

The museum was constructed to provide a home for our growing collection of machine tools dating from the 1860s to the early 1920s, complete with an operating overhead line shaft system that provides leather belt connected power to operate most of the machines. Originally, the line shaft would have been powered by a steam or gas engine; in the interest of practicality, ours is driven by a 10 HP electric motor. Some of our “newer” machines are from the period when electric motors were an option, so some of our machines were either ordered with that option or converted from line shaft power.

We have completed the restoration and powering of a Lucas horizontal boring machine (ca. 1912), Rockford planer (ca. 1920), Lathe & Morse lathe (ca. 1885), a Smith & Mills shaper (ca. 1917), a Pratt & Whitney #10 hand milling machine, an early 1900s radial drill, a 1920s Bullard 36-inch vertical turret lathe, an early 1900s Fellows 36” gear shaper and a Kwik-Kut power hack saw. We are currently working on restoring and powering a Putnam gap bed lathe ca. 1886 and a Hendey lathe ca. 1915. Awaiting restoration are a much older Bullard vertical turret lathe ca. 1903, a New Haven 78” pulley lathe ca. 1880, and many others!

When you visit the machine shop museum, we encourage you to try the foot-powered Ephram Brown treadle lathe ca. 1880, the Boynton & Plummer hand-powered shaper ca. 1885, and the Champion post-mounted drill press. And don’t forget to check out the displays that shows how to read a micrometer and drill a square hole!

Anyone who has an interest in “Old Iron” or metal machining is encouraged to contact us for details about joining the Machine Shop Museum – contactus@tuckahoesteam.org

Our Machine Tool Gallery pages document some of the more interesting machines in our collection.

We have a fully functional saw mill run solely off of historic equipment

In the pictures below you can see our Plymouth industrial locomotive ready to pull the excursion cars for our annual show and volunteers preparing our Mini Train in preparation for the show.