Threshing Memories
Let's Talk Rusty Iron
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An idealized rendering of a threshing scene from the cover of the July 1933 issue of Successful Farming Magazine.
Successful Farming Magazine, July 1933
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Well, I celebrated (if “celebrate” is the proper word) another birthday in August (OK, I attained the ripe old age of 76), and I’m waxing nostalgic about the good old days.
In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s a common failing among us “old geezers.”
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When I was a kid on the farm during the 1940s, we grew corn, oats, wheat and hay. That was the standard order of crop rotation and Dad taught me how to remember it by using the word cow followed by hay (cows eat hay, right?). The hay was mostly a clover and timothy mixture and was put into my uncle’s barn with the hayfork.
The grain harvest was the big deal of the harvest season. First wheat and then oats were cut with a McCormick-Deering ground-driven grain binder pulled by the Farmall F-30 tractor. My grandfather Moore, who we all called “Nandad,” usually rode the binder to adjust the levers and dump the sheaves in rows so they could be shocked by my father and uncle and, sometimes, a hired man.
The grain was left in the field in the shocks to “sweat” for about a week, and then the sheaves were pitched onto the old Chevy flatbed truck and hauled into our barn. The big log crib haymows, and usually the barn floor as well, were stacked to the rafters with sheaves of grain to await the coming of the thresher around the middle of August.
Threshing was an exciting event for me. The first threshing rig I can recall was a Huber tractor and a Huber separator owned by Floyd Bowers from near New Waterford, Ohio. I don’t know what became of Mr. Bowers, because Lorain Foulk, Calcutta, Ohio, then threshed for us for many years. I believe Mr. Foulk originally had a Case LA tractor but later got a big Minneapolis-Moline G with which he ran his Belle City threshing machine. Mr. Foulk also brought along a John Deere stationary baler to bale the straw.
Filling the haymow
On the east side of our barn was a large door off the barn floor that overlooked the barnyard. Dad and Uncle Chuck built a platform outside this door and the thresher was positioned so it could be fed from this platform. Two men stood on the platform and pitched the sheaves into the separator’s self-feeder, which was a fairly easy job since the feeder was just below the level of the platform. Men were stationed in the mows and on the barn floor to relay sheaves to the feeder men.
The clean grain was discharged into sacks, which several men carried on their shoulders to the nearby granary where it was dumped into the bins. The entrance to each bin had a double wooden track on either side into which boards could be slid. As the grain built up inside the bin, successive boards were added until the bin was full. We kids had a great time playing in the grain bins as they were filled and no one gave a thought to the danger of being suffocated. On some years, probably when the yield was exceptionally good, some of the wheat was hauled to a feed mill and sold.