The Farmer’s Friend wind stacker was manufactured by the Indiana
Mfg. Co. of Indianapolis. The Indiana company fought a battle as
familiar in 1912 (when this advertisement was published in The
American Thresherman) as it is nearly a century later:
trademark infringement. “To all persons buying and using wind
stackers, this trademark is for your protection as well as ours”
Quite likely, the farmer buying a wind stacker for use on his
thresher found a cheap imposter every bit as effective as the
Farmer’s Friend.
Introduced in the 1890s, wind stackers were used to blow straw
and chaff away from the thresher into a pile. Large fans mounted at
the rear of the machine provided the force needed to blast the
material through large galvanized tubes. In most cases, the tube
could be rotated and raised, giving the farmer flexibility in
location of straw piles. For a neat example of recycling, in the
earliest days of wind stackers, that straw might have been fed into
the steam traction engine powering the thresher, as straw was
sometimes used as fuel in those engines.
Advertisements from many farm publications printed at the
turn of the 20th century were more than mere methods to hawk
tractors and farm equipment. To share those ads from days gone
by, Farm Collector periodically reproduces some of the
most-spectacular ads used to promote farm equipment and
products.
To submit a vintage advertisement for possible publication,
send it to: Iron Age Ads, Farm Collector, 1503 S.W. 42nd
St., Topeka, KS 66609; or submit high-quality digital images by
e-mail: editor@farmcollector.com
