WINDSOR -- Have a hankering to watch laundry washed in a tub?

Smell crab apples cooking on a wood stove? Press apples for cider? Run a printing press?

Watch the delicate stitches of needle-point?

See a sheet metal worker finish a copper top hat?

These crafts and others will be performed as they once were in the 19th century (and later) in a corner of the Windsor Fair where time seems to stand still.

In an enclave apart from the bleating of the sheep pens, the cackle of the poultry barn and the roar of pulling tractors, the Windsor Historical Society has accumulated a tiny hamlet, schoolhouse and all.

While the area has offered displays all week to those attending the fair and will continue on Monday, today's focus is "Historical & Museum Day" and volunteers will be showing crafts of bygone years to everyone who strolls by.

On Saturday, Don Bassett, art director for the Maine State Museum, perfected his typesetting skills, using spacers to block letters and zinc, lead and copper plates and then lock them into a frame that could be mounted to a manual press.

"We'll do a bookmark and some odds and ends for kids and probably some notepads and things for the historical society," he said. With his green eye shade, full apron and handlebar mustache, he could have been doing the same activity decades ago.

"I do this as a learning experience to promote the art," Bassett said. "It's a challenge for me because I work on computers all the time."

The printing press -- a model probably familiar to industrial arts students until about the 1960s -- requires good manual dexterity. Once the handwork was finished, the printer then had to start using his feet to pump the press. The ink was applied to the plate and then the single sheet of paper was inserted and pressed to the plate.

"To get the ink to spread evenly requires about 10 minutes of working this pedal," Bassett said.

He likes to recruit children to roll the press and then they take home the page they make.

They can say, "Hey gramps, I printed this on a machine like you used to use."

Across the museum corridor, sheet metal worker Fred Hatch of Windsor pulled half a dozen tiny copper rivets from a brown paper bag. "Fifty cents each," he grumbled. "I didn't want to pay it but I did."

He preferred the prices of the 1940s, he said, when the six would have cost a total of "two bits."

The rivets were destined to help finish off a copper top hat commissioned for Bob Brann, president of the historical society and a trustee of the Windsor Fair.

Brann said the historical society focuses on 1865 farm life, but includes other things as well.

In a large barn nearby, Dick Harriman offered a quick explanation of how hay was baled before mechanization, with the use of ropes wound around wheels, a tall wooden box, and leverage. "Four guys, two oxen, some dust, some cussin' and they got it done," he said.

Natalie Gardner of Palermo trimmed clay mugs she had thrown that morning, an electrically powered wheel her only concession to modern times.

She and Judy Harriman of Gardiner, both professional potters who volunteer their services, produce clay bean pots, mugs, bowls and baked apple dishes during the fair. They bring them home to finish over the winter and sell them the following year to benefit the society.

All the pieces are signed and dated and say "made on fairgrounds." In the Corner School House that hailed from neighboring Somerville, 5-year-old Grace Carlson of Belgrade drew a chalk daisy on a slate for her father.

She smiled broadly but wasn't sure she would trade her first grade year at Belgrade Central School for a course at the old school house with its aisles framed by wooden desks and heated by a large black woodstove.

And in one of the warmer activities on a bright, breezy day, Jan Tricarico of Winthrop pounded and forged long iron spikes into hooked stakes that would anchor a large awning.

As she cranked the wheeled bellows, a metal rose she crafted earlier cooled at the edge of the water bucket.

The fair continues Monday (Labor Day).

Betty Adams -- 621-5631

badams@centralmaine.com