July 2008
Loretta Sorensen
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This John Deere 28x46 thresher is put through its paces at a threshing bee in Merrill, Iowa. Photo by Bonita Davison.
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Heritage Harvest: Community effort comes together to produce old-time threshing bee
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Many things have changed in the past century, but not this: If you're going to put on a threshing bee, you're going to need a lot of help.
As Dean and Bonita Davison worked with their Percheron teams and got acquainted with other draft horse enthusiasts in their area, they began to consider the idea of organizing a threshing bee near their home southeast of Le Mars, Iowa.
Today that's evolved into an event held in conjunction with Pioneer Days in Merrill, Iowa, about 15 miles north of Sioux City - and purchase of an antique thresher.
'We started planting corn with our team and just loved doing that,' Bonita says. 'Seven or eight years ago, we used machinery owned by a local club to set up a threshing demonstration during our county fair. We had difficulty coordinating everything when we didn't own the equipment, so we decided to start looking for our own thresher.'
Tracking down a thresher
The Davisons' search led them to Minnesota, where they found a John Deere 28x46 thresher that had been parked in a machine shed for 10 years. 'The man who owned it used it once since he bought it,' Dean says. 'It was in real good condition and all the belts were good. I brought it home, power washed it and used it that afternoon for threshing at our neighbor's field.'
As he searched for a threshing machine, Dean found that machines with wooden parts were often in very poor condition. If the threshing machine hadn't been stored under a roof and protected from wildlife, it deteriorated quickly.
'A lot of the machines I looked at had become a home for raccoons,' he says. 'They do a lot of damage in a hurry. This machine has metal sieves and, as far as I could tell, there hadn't been any coons in it.' The Davisons don't know the model number of their thresher, which they believe dates to the late 1920s or early 1930s.
Well-maintained vintage threshing machines are not easy to find. Because of their size, the machines weren't always stored inside. Many threshing machines in the Midwest have been sold for scrap metal or, in the 1960s and '70s, were auctioned and taken to Mexico, where they were put to work in the field.
Community pitches in
Finding equipment was just the beginning of the labor the Davisons invested in organizing a threshing bee. Two local landowners allowed them to sow oats in small fields. They used their team to drill the oats and spent the summer finalizing plans for their event.
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