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Maasdam Barns opens Vintage Louden Playground
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FAIRFIELD – Maasdam Barns has officially opened its playground dedicated to celebrating the legacy of the Louden Machinery Company.
On Aug. 9, the Maasdam Barns Historic Preservation Committee hosted a “Playground Party” to show off its Vintage Louden Playground equipment that was manufactured in the early 1900s. The playground, in a fenced-off area west of the museum and visitor center, includes a merry-go-round, a whirl-around under renovation, and a teeter-totter, slide and swing set that are all one structure, which was once owned by a Fairfield family.
Maasdam Barns Historic Preservation Committee President Tony Webb said he could hardly believe his luck when, after searching high and low for Louden playground equipment across the state and region, discovered a well-preserved piece right here at home. That equipment belonged to the Vander Hamm family, who moved to Fairfield in 1962.
Lowell “Van” Vander Hamm and his wife Helen raised three children in Fairfield, and they are Susan (Strobl), Sherry (Ogren) and Scott. The family lived on West Taylor Avenue, the dead end just west of Pence Elementary School. Sherry said it was the perfect neighborhood for her and her siblings because there were so many other kids around. And those kids loved to visit the Vander Hamms because they had something unusual in their backyard.
In his work as a civil engineer with the DOT, Lowell had occasion to travel on the county’s many rural roads, and on one such trip he came across the Louden playground set featuring a slide, swing set and teeter totter. Sherry is not sure where he found it, though Susan thinks he got it from an abandoned country schoolhouse north of Fairfield.
“He went out by himself to dig up this playground, take it apart, and somehow move it to our backyard at West Taylor Avenue,” Sherry said. “He must have seen it and said, ‘I’m going to take this home for my kids.’”
Lowell moved the playground to their house sometime in the mid-1960s when Susan was in middle school and Sherry and Scott were in elementary. One of the kids’ childhood friends was Linda Weller, who appears in a photo playing with them on the equipment in 1967, and which they re-enacted when the Vander Hamm family visited Maasdam Barns this past August. When Sherry and her husband Rick married in 1979, they posed for wedding pictures on the teeter totter.
Lowell maintained the equipment well over the years, a testament to his skills as a craftsman and his preference for fixing the old over purchasing the new.
“Instead of buying a new one, he’d spend hours redoing something in the garage, and he loved figuring out how things worked,” Sherry said.
Lowell put these skills to use renovating the playground for his grandchildren. The playground initially had wooden swings and wooden sides to the slide, and Lowell replaced those with new swings and a stainless steel slide.
“The grandkids, who are now 41 and 36, remember going down the slide on wax paper,” Sherry said. “Dad kept it in really great shape because he liked the extra speed. It usually shot us off the end pretty good.”
Lowell passed away in 2014, and then four years later Helen moved into an assisted living center in Iowa City. She passed away last December. When it was time for the family to sell the house, they didn’t know what to do with the huge playground set in the backyard.
“Someone offered to give so much for it to become scrap metal, and we went, ‘Oh, we don’t want it to go to scrap metal,’” Sherry said.
That’s when auctioneer Rick Spees connected the family to Webb.
“I felt like a kid in a candy store,” Webb recalled. “We had been looking at Louden equipment all over the state, and here was a piece right under our noses.”
Webb said the preservation committee acquired the playground in 2022, but couldn’t do anything with it for a few years. The committee was attempting to create a playground with all Louden equipment, and it was a lot of work to both find the equipment and get it back in working shape. In 2021, the committee secured a grant from the Greater Jefferson County Foundation to put in a chain-link fence around the perimeter, and then started adding mulch after Drish Construction elevated the land.
“For the last two years, we’ve been focused on getting the equipment up and going so people can operate it,” Webb said. “It won’t be open 24/7, but we’ll open it when we have events. We’ll emphasize the historical aspects of the equipment, and why we don’t see equipment like that anymore.”
Webb said that playgrounds took off in an era when farm machinery was becoming increasingly mechanized, and governments worried that children were not getting enough exercise.
“We want people to be able to see the playground of yesterday,” Webb said. “A lot more people remember the playgrounds than remember using the hay trolleys, so we hope this will bring in more people who can relate to the Louden items.”
Sherry, who now resides in Lone Tree, said she’s glad her childhood playground set has found a new home.
“It makes me proud that the playground is still standing in all its glory,” she said. “Dad would be so proud.”
Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com
