Feeding the Threshers

Home-built threshers' cook shack dating to late 1800s unearthed in rural Missouri shed.

By Leslie C. Mcmanus
Updated on May 20, 2022
article image
by Leslie C. McManus
The cook shack is paired here with a 20hp Rumely engine owned by the McClure family. In actual use, it was likely hitched behind the threshing machine for travel from site to site.

We’ve all heard about the legendary meals prepared for threshing crews by farmers’ wives. The tale less often told is of the cook shacks that traveled the route with steam threshing operations. It’s a story come to life in Trenton, Missouri, where a cook shack that once accompanied a steam-powered threshing crew has been rescued and preserved as a page from the past.

Built by father and son Bill and Okey Boram, Humphreys, Missouri, the cook shack probably dates to a period of time between 1890 and 1900, based on an archaeologist’s informal assessment. Bill Boram’s steam engines were the heart of a threshing operation that blanketed the area.

Mike Williams and Adam McClure

Well over a hundred years ago, that area was not as big as one might think. “That cook shack was used within 10 or 12 miles of home,” says Mike Williams, Parsons, Missouri. “It was made to be pulled at 5 miles an hour, hitched to the back of the thresher.” Steam engines crept from farm to farm; days started early and ended late. Crew members did little more than work and sleep, the latter likely in the barn or on the ground beneath wagons.

A challenging retrieval

For decades, the cook shack was safely ensconced within a shed, where it was used as a tool shack. When a summer storm blew the shed down, concrete was poured around the shack and a new, shorter shed was built around it. So gradually that it escaped notice, over the years the shack sunk into the shed’s dirt floor down to its axles.

Online Store Logo
Need Help? Call 1-866-624-9388