Ask a grade-schooler where milk comes from, and you’ll probably hear “the grocery store.” That’s the gap the Missouri River Valley Steam Engine Association has spent 63 years trying to close, and this month’s Boonville Steam Engine Show was the latest run at it, according to KOMU 8.
The four-day show fills the Brady Showgrounds in Boonville every early September with replica period homes, era-appropriate farming demonstrations, old tractors and engines, and enough hands-on tools that a kid can actually watch old-fashioned agriculture happen instead of just hearing about it. There’s a tractor-pulled barrel train for the younger crowd, too, in case threshing demonstrations don’t hold a 6-year-old’s attention on their own.
“You can ask somebody in grade school where milk comes from, and I would say 95% of them would say it comes from the grocery store,” association member Dennis Ficken told KOMU — which is close to the whole point of the show: hands-on agricultural history, not a museum behind glass.
The show has been at Brady Showgrounds since 1999, after Ficken struck up a friendship with local farmer Arnold Brady that got the event moved there in 1997. Association president JJ Young has watched the show grow up alongside its audience. “It’s funny — you look back, and some of the kids we used to show are now members to this day,” Young said. He’s got a personal stake in the math, too: “This will be the 50th show that I’ve ever went to and I’m 50 years old.”
Young’s already looking decades out — he’s hoping to be around to celebrate the show’s 100th run, which by his count is roughly 37 years off, somewhere around 2063. For a Cooper County event that’s spent six decades quietly teaching kids how a farm actually worked before the grocery store did the work for them, that’s a reasonable thing to want to stick around for.
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