The century wasn't half over when Maurice Dufresne, today 68 years old, began collecting old wrecks of agricultural equipment and miscellaneous objects. In an era considered to be modern, others rushed to throw them away. Originally a blacksmith, he went on to manufacture trailers and then to create a salvage company in Villeperdue.

With this passion which took more and more space, what was missing was an adequate location. He found it in 1983 in Marnay, near Azay-le-Rideau. It was a former mill, equipped with its machines, located on the Indre river.  Beginning in 1992, he began to make of it the craziest, largest, funniest, most moving and most spread out museum one can imagine. More than three thousand objects are exhibited here in an incredible maze: agricultural machines, tractors, locomotives, sweepers, weaving machines, linotype, perfume atomizer, sleigh, airplanes (Blériot's and the one used to escape in the film "La Grande Vadrouillle), carriages, an authentic guillotine, weapons (three halls), wax heads,

posters and 1,500 other objects to be placed in new buildings under construction. 

"Each object was either given, bought or exchanged" [...]  In order to find these treasures, good relations have to be maintained with implement dealers who have a good eye. It is often in a shed that one finds rusting a tractor, a plow, a reaper which has not yet become a combine harvester... "