Lakeland Harvest Show Teaches Thousands About the Past

Activities and old machines fill 20 acres in Esko every year

ESKO, Minn. – Thousands of visitors were transported back in time at the annual Lakehead Harvest Show in Esko.

The show has been keeping the past alive for fifty-seven years.

The educational non-profit shows families what the Northland was like a hundred years ago.

Every August, twenty acres north of Esko fills with displays and activities for thousands to enjoy.

Guests can watch tractor pulling, a saw mill, and a lot of century-old machines do some tough work.

They can even eat corn on the cob steamed with an old steam engine.

“They’ve never seen this stuff before and what you had to go through and do and how what we’re doing now was an improvement over what it was,” said Ryan Hansen, President of the Lakehead Harvest Show. “There’s stuff that looks really hard but that was a vast improvement over what they did before that even.”

Event organizers say it’s important to remember the past and it can be a lot of fun to learn about.

James Watry has been coming to the harvest show since it began.

He brings his 1920s Minneapolis tractor and says teaching its history to families is the most fun he has all year.

“I look forward to having people come up to me and ask me questions about something or when we’re starting this thing, we crank start it by hand and you get a lot of people around watching,” said Watry, whose family started the event in the 1960s.

Some modern technology is shown off at the event to show families how far we’ve come in the last century.

The show takes place every year on the last weekend in August.