The sun was bright, the rain stayed away, and the people turned out to see what Derrick Days at the Penn Brad Oil Museum were all about on Saturday.

The museum’s manager, Sam Slocum, said “We had a very nice turnout,” guessing about 250 people visited.

“It’s hard to estimate. We were open from 11 to 5 and people were all around all day long,” he said. With a laugh, he added, “the food was all gone.”

The grounds were filled with oil field equipment from today and yesteryear, all drawing the attention of visitors from out of town and many from the local area as well.

The father and son team of Paul Phillips and Jordon Roeder from Phillips and Roeder Well Services captured attention with a 1962 Bucyrus Erie Spudder.

The museum manager explained the spudder is still used today for drilling water wells.

“Rather than turning and grinding up the rocks, it smashes them and makes mud,” he explained. “There’s another tool called a bailer that pulls the mud out. If you have a more modern rig, you’d use a rotary. It grinds away the rocks and has a vacuum in it in that sucks the rocks away,” Slocum said.

“We had a number of oil field engines on display, including one that came down from Erie” for the event. Three local men and two from out-of-town brought engines to show visitors.

“John Hannahs brought the Custer City Oil truck and parked it out in front of the museum,” the manager said. “I think it’s from the ‘40s and it’s a Dodge Power Wagon.”

Former museum docent Sherri Schulze was in one of the drilling rigs to talk about it, while Dean Fox and Ron Moyer gave lectures inside the museum.

Fox spoke about the life and accomplishments of Solomon Dresser, and Moyer spoke about the history of Rew, which was once a boom town known as Rew City.

“There’s a lot of neat stuff at the museum that people wouldn’t expect to find there,” Slocum said. That includes professionally made movies of Kendall workers dating from 1935, 1948 and 1968. “They appear to be fillers for professional movie theaters. They have been digitized for our theater.”

A lot of the things at the museum had been in storage at American Refining Group, and were donated to the museum to share the history of the industry with the public.

While this is the fifth or sixth year of the event, it was held at a different time of the summer than usual. The manager explained, “We usually did it to coincide with the Italian Festival, but we picked a different day because there was so much going on.”

“I think it was pretty successful.”