There she was, glowing enticingly on my monitor. She was incredibly well built. Round in all the right places. She had these beautifully curved, powerful legs.

True, she was no spring chicken, but she was remarkably well preserved. I tend to like the older models, anyway. There’s no substitute for experience.

And she could be mine. For a price.

So I bought her. I probably overpaid, but these decisions aren’t made with the brain. They come from a deeper place. A place with a bottomless thirst for…

Cider!

She was a classic apple press, a compact masterpiece of American agricultural ingenuity, a symphony of iron gears, bearings, and flywheels encased in a stylish oak frame. Her particulars were proudly cast into her massive fittings: “Latest Improved Buckeye, P.P. Mast & Co., Springfield, Ohio.” Her patents ranged from May 29th, 1855 through August 24th, 1866.

So my brand new baby was, oh, about 130 years old. Give or take.

(Actually, she might be as young as 100. I found a notice published in the New York Times on February 13th, 1908, announcing the sad demise of P.P. Mast & Co., which was forced to close by “financial stringency.” But I prefer to think she’s a bit more…mature.)

I saw plenty of pictures of her online, but when I first saw her in person, there was a moment of inevitable disappointment. Yes, the ad had mentioned a bit of powder post beetle damage. But there was more than just a bit of it. The bottom six inches of one of the legs had been completely gobbled away; another leg was missing a good two inches of wood. The beetles had gone to town on other parts of the press as well.

And what was that gargantuan farm chain doing wrapped around the wood frame?

Holding the decrepit thing together, perhaps?

The good news was that the apple grinding and pressing mechanisms were in fine shape. A few cranks of the big handle were enough to set the massive flywheel in motion, and once that bad boy was spinning, the machine almost ran itself.

Heroic visions—starring me, of course—flashed in my mind. We would put our apple harvest to practical use this year. There would be cider. And we wouldn’t stop there. We would brew hard cider, another step in the long march to self-sufficiency. There would be fermentation on St. Peter’s Church Road!

Never mind that our apple harvest, if you can even call it that, might amount to a few sorry bushels. If anything’s left after the mites, curculios, sawflies, codling moths, aphids, fruitworms, leafminers, and borers have eaten their fill.

Never mind that brewing is fraught with perils, not least of which, I’ve since learned, is that all of your hard-won cider can wind up tasting like cast iron. Thanks to all the cast iron in that romantic old cider press.

None of that mattered. All I could see were happy children taking turns cranking the big handle and drinking pure, fresh cider. And nervous parents in the background, telling them to keep their fingers out of the gears.

I counted out the bills, and made arrangements for delivery.

Since then, I’ve spent many blissful, albeit sweaty, hours in the pole barn with our Latest Improved Buckeye. I found a small cache of white oak milled from an antique barn beam, and have lovingly rebuilt those powdery legs. I’ve had the pleasure of disassembling a machine down to its component parts, freeing frozen nuts and bolts, pounding out dowels, unmating perfectly cut tenons from their pristine mortises.

Those mortises are really something to see. Cutting a perfectly square, two-inch deep mortise in hard oak is no picnic. I only had to cut one of them myself, and that was plenty. But the craftsmen of the 1870s knew what they were doing. At first, I thought the joints were machine-made. Then I cleared out the bottom of a mortise and found a neat row of ghostly tell-tale chisel marks.

It was a moment of recognition that raised the hair on the back of my neck. I imagined the maker running his finger along the bottom of that mortise, just like I was. Perhaps he’d fought in the Civil War and relished the calm of peacetime work. Or maybe he was a recent immigrant, wondering whether he’d ever be able to afford a fancy cider press for his family. Could he have imagined his spanking new press in the current state she was in?

I had to leave her in pieces, but I can’t wait to get back at it. Next up: scouring the cast iron parts and lubricating the bearings.

Seems there are plenty of thrills in the old girl yet.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 04 June 2009

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com