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Getting Back to Steam
Small Birdsall engine fires up collector
By Bill Vossler
Everett Johnson never forgot what it felt like to drive a steam traction engine. "When I was a youngster on the farm (in the 1920s and 1930s)," the 80-year-old Pelican Rapids, Minn., native says, "my dad was a partner in a Northwest steam engine that we used to fill silos. After the day's work was done, and the steam had just about petered out, my dad would let my brother and me drive that Northwest around the barnyard. That's where I first got the bug."
As he got older, he helped with farm work involving the steam engine. "I pitched (corn) bundles for the Northwest. We'd pick them up in the field and haul them in a hay rack with horses and throw them into the ensilage cutter." They would use the steam engine to put ensilage in the silo.
The Northwest steam engine was the only one the Johnsons ever had, but other friends threshed with an Advance steam traction engine, or a Case. "So those were the engines I grew up with," Everett says.
In those days, a steam traction engine moving from farm to farm was quite a sight, Everett says. "That was really exciting to youngsters to see this big powerful thing come up your driveway. Everybody was out looking, even the mothers. The smoke and steam that came off the machine had their own powerful and memorable smells."
Workers needed for filling silos or threshing with the steam traction engines came mostly from neighbors, Everett says. "In those days there were just plain farm workers, if you want to call them that. They would all come together and work at our place, and we would go back to theirs and help them when their project was going on."
The steam engine required quite a crew, including, at the very least, a water hauler, fuel/wood/straw haulers, a fireman, and an engineer.
Threshing season started in August and went into October. "Five, six, seven neighbors would all hire each other, and the same thresher would come to all different places. Sometimes a threshing run would last ten days."
Early threshing was called a "threshing run," and later, after bundles had been piled high waiting for the steam engine to come to a particular farm, it was called "stack threshing." "Sometimes stack threshing was done even after some of the snow had come," Everett explains.
Food was provided by the farm women. "The poor wives..." Everett says. "Sometimes they would get help from a neighbor's wife, and in lots of cases there were daughters in the home. But that was a big job for a farmer's wife when threshers came. They would make an early morning breakfast, forenoon lunch, big dinner, afternoon lunch, and evening supper. They worked hard, and everybody tried to out-do each other, so the meals were just wonderful, all the pies and trimmings..."