The Millville Fireman’s Carnival, Millville, PA

To kick off the rural Pennsylvania carnival and fair season this summer I would like introduce the 82^nd annual Millville Fireman’s Carnival of Millville, PA!  My parents and I decided to head up to the carnival on the evening of Sunday, July 3, only to arrive at a sad and deserted fairgrounds.  Vespers!  No fair on Sundays in a Quaker town.  While my parents decided to catch the sermon, I wandered around the tiny fairgrounds and got a privileged look at the old carousel and carnival rides when there were no children or ride operators to thwart me.

This carousel is a classic Allan Herschell from the 1920s or 30s.  These are the original wooden carousel horses, still mobile after all these years.  From what limited information I have gathered about this carousel, I've learned that it was originally steam powered, but was converted to gas in the 1940s.  The gas engine was in operation from the 1940s until the 1990s, when the carousel finally went electric, but the gas engine is still available for perusal to any carousel rider.  My favorite part of any carousel is the calliope, and this calliope is a beauty!  It even has a drum attached to it for extra zest.  I am hoping that we will return sometime this week when the fair is actually running so I will have a chance to hear the authentic carnival sounds of the carousel calliope.  On the outside of the carousel are recent paintings of classic scenes from Millville and its environs. 

The other rides I checked out were the little carnival Ferris wheel and the kiddie cars that go around in a circle.  The Ferris wheel hasn’t been completely assembled yet, and as you can see the three seats that are missing at the top of the wheel are waiting patiently on the ground for their day of carnival glory.  This Ferris wheel is also pretty old, and dates from the time that it would have been considered regular sized!  The little cars are interesting because they are also from the 30s or 40s, which you can tell because they are modeled after classic Studebakers, or whatever 40s cars these might be. 

Any carnival enthusiast who makes it to a rural PA fair should make a point to play my all-time favorite carnival game: Ring a Bottle of Soda.  Sometimes I am very lucky at this game, and last year I won three bottles of soda in a single round.  I don’t even much like drinking the soda after I’ve won, but I like being able to bluster around the carnival with an armful of heavy glass bottles filled with vibrantly colored varieties of locally manufactured sodas (Big Ben’s of Catawissa, PA), most likely dropping them once or twice throughout the course of the evening and then tripping over them and making a lot of clinky racket (Of course I'm sober!  This is soda!).  Many times, though, I lose.  But the nice thing is that this game shows up at just about every local carnival over the summer, so if you manage it right you could probably stock up on soda to last you the winter.