About the Museum

The Museum of Maurice Dufresne (in French: Musée Maurice-Dufresne) is a technological history museum located in the mill at Marnay, near the Château of Azay-le-Rideau, France. It has acquired numerous important objects displayed in vast buildings containing some 25 rooms. The museum pieces are presented thematically: agricultural machines, silk and textile industries, musketry, hydraulic power, etc. Born in 1930, Maurice Dufresne began his training as a blacksmith at the age of fourteen and joined the "Compagnons du Devoir", an organization of journeymen -craftsmen, to begin a tour of France, working for twenty different employers. In 1958, he created his own company in Villeperdue in the region Indre-et-Loire. He started out in the salvage business and began saving things which he thought worthy of placing later in his museum, thereby avoiding the destruction of part of the French heritage. Thirty years later, on 24 October 1992, the prefect, the notables of the region and the press inaugurated the Museum Maurice Dufresne in Marnay near Azay-le-Rideau, on the banks of the Indre river in an old mill on a site owned by Geoffroy de l'Ile in 1026, which later became a paper factory in the time of Balzac. The scrap dealer from Villeperdue, armed only with his enthusiasm, was able to create this amazing museum of collections of machines from a road roller to a hearse, from a copper sulfate sprayer to a Louis Blériot monoplane, and to present all of this in enjoyable surroundings. His museum today presents more than 3,000 machines in warehouses covering 10,000 m2. It has already attracted 600,000 visitors and 23 guestbooks are filled with comments from around the world. In the last few years, Maurice Dufresne has continually travelled between Marnay and Villeperdue, where 27 people run the medium-sized salvage business.