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The Jemison Maintenance Department dazzled Jemison children with heavy-duty equipment exhibitions and demonstrations on June 20 during the Jemison Public Library Story Hour.

After patriotic crafts in the Jemison City Auditorium, the story hour group trekked outdoors to visit the large garage with looming machinery stationed behind the City Hall and Marion Bank and Trust properties.

Instructed by Mason Miller of the maintenance department, children interacted with a bulldozer and tractor with a bush hog as they learned of the equipment’s functions for city maintenance work.

“Now, Mr. Justin (Price) over here, he’s a professional tractor driver, and he takes this and goes up and down the side of the road and cuts the grass,” Miller said. “Sometimes, we get stuck in mud really bad, and he has to come pull us out.”

Next, it was time to watch the machines in action.

Miller pointed to the department’s Bobcat skid-steer loader.

“We’re going to bring it around here and push that rock and make it real smooth,” he said, indicating a truckload of rock specially set aside for story hour.

The children were fascinated.

The dump truck tilted its trailer, pouring rocks onto the lot. The bulldozer and Bobcat transported the material and smoothed it across the ground.

After its attention to the rock, the Bobcat set its sights on a pile of brush and began chomping the debris to transport it elsewhere with its metal teeth.

The children were especially transfixed when employee Shelby Posey secured himself in a harness and climbed into the bucket of a bucket truck to be raised into the sky.

“He gets up really high like that and cuts trees,” Miller told the little onlookers.

The children waved to Posey and squinted into the bright sky as he was lifted higher and higher.

“That’s fun!” one little girl exclaimed to her mother. “I wish I could go up there!”

Librarian Tammie McGriff said the experience was more than she had hoped for when she first reached out to the department for a story hour field trip.

“Thank you to the mayor and to the [maintenance] department for taking the time,” McGriff said. “I mean, they have worked on this. They brought those (tree) limbs in, they brought the rocks in — they’re great.”

For more information about the Jemison Public Library, call (205) 688-4492, ext. 318.