Athens Truck Show: Inside the Tackaberry Collection

By Brent Robillard

Inside one of Canada’s great private vehicle collections—and the community that gathers around it

There are few things more familiar to a watch collector than the sight of someone leaning over an object while another person explains exactly why it’s important. Sometimes the object is a vintage chronograph on a table at a watch show. Sometimes it is a 70-year-old International truck sitting in the sun on Washburn Road.

Yesterday, the second scene played out again and again at the 11th Annual Athens Truck Show. The event takes place just around the corner from my home in Athens, Ontario, on the property of G. Tackaberry & Sons Construction. Hosted by the Upper Canada Chapter of the Antique Truck Club of America, it drew hundreds of classic, antique, and modern trucks from across Canada and the northeastern United States. Ontario and Quebec were especially well represented, but I also spotted trucks that had travelled from as far away as Maryland and Tennessee.

It is an extraordinary sight in a small eastern Ontario community. Long rows of polished grilles, tall exhaust stacks, hand-painted lettering, and acres of chrome filled the construction yard. Some trucks had been restored to the condition in which they might have left the factory. Others wore their working lives openly: faded paint, worn seats, old company names, and the marks left by decades of hauling, plowing, farming, or building roads.

A truck show without velvet ropes

The show ran from 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. on Friday, August 21, and from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, August 22. Admission was free for spectators, with donations welcomed for the Athens Food Bank. There was no formal judging. Instead, the weekend included slow-truck races, live entertainment, food vendors, barbecues, and evening light displays.

That lack of judging suited the atmosphere. The trucks were impressive, but the day felt less like a concours and more like a reunion. Owners opened doors, lifted hoods, answered questions, and caught up with people they had met at other shows. Children climbed into cabs while adults studied engines and traded stories about where a truck had come from or what it had taken to bring it back.

I kept overhearing fragments of conversation about events elsewhere in Ontario, Quebec, and the United States. Participants compared routes, attendance, and the trucks they had encountered along the way. The information moved through the crowd in the same manner that watch collectors share news of auctions, meetups, estate finds, and upcoming releases. The objects bring people together, but the relationships keep them travelling.

Restored and modified Seagrave fire engine @calibre321

The collection behind the show

The location adds another dimension. George Tackaberry’s private collection is housed on the same property and contains roughly 250 historic vehicles indoors, making it the largest truck collection in Canada. His concentration of historic International Harvester trucks has also been described as the largest of its kind in the world.

The numbers only begin to explain it. Large warehouses contain restored trucks alongside antique tractors, snowmobiles, automobiles, boats, railway equipment, and industrial memorabilia. Cadillacs are another recurring interest, including an armoured example. A railroad truck joins the assortment of machines that seem to blur the line between transportation and heavy equipment. Earlier accounts of the collection also describe extensive displays of scale-model trucks, cars, trains, airplanes, motorcycles, and construction machinery.

Outside those buildings lies another ten acres of antique trucks. Some are awaiting restoration, some supply scarce parts, and others are already being worked on. The view is a reminder that collecting at this scale requires more than money and storage. It needs mechanics, fabricators, painters, research, and patience. When replacement parts cannot be found, they may have to be made.

The collection is private and is not ordinarily open to the public. Even during the truck show, only a portion is displayed. That small selection is enough to suggest the depth of what sits behind the warehouse doors.

Tackaberry’s warehouses are decorated with period memorabilia @calibre321

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When one truck becomes 250

A 2004 profile in Truck News carried the wonderfully direct headline, “For Tackaberry, Trucks Became an Addiction.” At the time, the collection was already the largest in Canada, although it was considerably smaller than it is today. Tackaberry described buying vehicles in Connecticut and elsewhere, then bringing them back to Athens for restoration. The profile found International trucks from the 1940s and 1950s lined up beside Mack and Dodge models, with dozens of roadworthy originals stored nearby.

Watch collectors will recognize the progression. A first purchase is practical, sentimental, or opportunistic. The second fills a gap. The third introduces a new category. Soon there is a filing system, a network of contacts, a shelf of reference books, and a highly specific opinion about an obscure component that most people have never noticed.

Scale changes the problem, of course. A wristwatch can be tucked into a roll or a safety-deposit box. A vintage truck needs a building, tools, fuel, tires, and room to turn around. Yet the impulses behind the collections are remarkably close. Both preserve design, engineering, and the evidence of how people once lived and worked. Both reward the collector who learns to distinguish an original detail from a later replacement. Both can turn a mechanical object into a route toward history.

Tackaberry’s collection extends well beyond vehicles @calibre321

Restoration, originality, and use

The debate between restoration and preservation also crosses easily from trucks to watches. Should an old dial be refinished? Should worn paint be left alone? Does replacing an engine, cab, movement part, or handset protect the object’s future or erase part of its past? There is no answer that works for every example.

Restoration or preservation? @calibre321

At the Athens show, some owners pursued gleaming, factory-fresh presentation. Others preserved dents, lettering, and paint that documented a truck’s working life. Neither approach felt automatically more authentic. What mattered was knowing what had been changed, what had survived, and why the owner had chosen a particular path.

The best restorations also return machinery to use. Many of the trucks arrived under their own power. They idled, raced slowly, lit up after dark, and carried their owners home again when the weekend ended. Mechanical collections become more legible when they move. A watch makes greater sense on a wrist, and a truck makes greater sense when its engine is running.

One of Tackaberry’s 250 restored vehicles @calibre321

The people around the machines

The Athens Truck Show offered spectacle, but its real appeal was social. The participants knew one another. They remembered previous vehicles, earlier restorations, and last year’s roadside trouble. They introduced friends to friends and made plans for the next show.

That is the part of collecting outsiders often miss. A collection can appear private because ownership is individual. In practice, knowledge is communal. Someone knows where to locate a correct part. Someone else remembers the company that operated a particular truck. Another person has photographs, service records, or a story passed down through a family. The object becomes richer as those pieces are added.

In practice, collecting is communal @calibre321

Watch culture operates in much the same way. Most of us can trace favourite pieces to conversations as readily as to catalogues. We remember who first handed us a certain watch, who explained a movement, or who sent the late-night message about an auction listing. The collection may sit at home, but collecting happens among people.

By late Saturday afternoon, trucks were beginning to pull away from Washburn Road. Some had travelled hundreds of kilometres to be there. Their owners will meet again at another fairground, construction yard, or museum, and the conversation will resume almost exactly where it stopped. That may be the clearest connection between these machines and the watches we usually discuss. The collecting is important. The community built around it is what gives the collection a life beyond the objects themselves.