A 110-year-old portable gas engine that remained on a family farm through three generations has finally moved to town. Mary Rist, whose family owned the 6hp Famous horizontal gas engine now on loan to the Daneville Heritage Museum in Viborg, South Dakota, says the 4-cycle engine was long a fixture on her family’s rural Centerville, South Dakota, farm.
“My late husband, Donald, inherited the engine when he inherited the farm,” Mary says. “I know my father-in-law, Fred, used it for harvesting, which was before I came on the scene.”
The Rist family farm was started in 1878 by German immigrant Johannes Rist who was born in 1854. Johannes passed the farm to the second generation, his son Fred, who passed it on to the third generation, Mary’s husband Don, who expanded the farm.
Don and Mary
