Powered By Animal Tread Power

By Sam Moore
Published on February 15, 2011
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A “level tread” horse power made by Appleton Mfg. Co., Batavia, Ill., driving a corn sheller.
A “level tread” horse power made by Appleton Mfg. Co., Batavia, Ill., driving a corn sheller.
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Another level tread, this one made by the Ellis Keystone Agricultural Works, Pottstown, Pa., and owned by the Calvin family, Radnor, Ohio.
Another level tread, this one made by the Ellis Keystone Agricultural Works, Pottstown, Pa., and owned by the Calvin family, Radnor, Ohio.
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A Buckwalter Champion one-horse, level tread power made by Shaeffer, Merkel & Co., Fleetwood, Pa., displayed at the Pasto Ag Museum, Rock Springs, Pa.
A Buckwalter Champion one-horse, level tread power made by Shaeffer, Merkel & Co., Fleetwood, Pa., displayed at the Pasto Ag Museum, Rock Springs, Pa.
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A small dog treadmill intended to power a churn, cream separator, grindstone or fanning mill. The unit was probably made by the Vermont Farm Machine Co., Bellows Falls, Vt., and is owned by the Calvin family, Radnor, Ohio.
A small dog treadmill intended to power a churn, cream separator, grindstone or fanning mill. The unit was probably made by the Vermont Farm Machine Co., Bellows Falls, Vt., and is owned by the Calvin family, Radnor, Ohio.
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The Westinghouse two-horse tread power and No. 4 thresher from an 1886 Westinghouse Co. catalog. Sold as a set, this combination cost $525 (roughly $12,209 today). An elevator for bagging and tallying grain cost an extra $25.
The Westinghouse two-horse tread power and No. 4 thresher from an 1886 Westinghouse Co. catalog. Sold as a set, this combination cost $525 (roughly $12,209 today). An elevator for bagging and tallying grain cost an extra $25.

Long before the internal combustion engine was perfected or steam power became popular, horses, mules, cattle, dogs, goats and even sheep were pressed into service to supplement human brawn as a power source. So long as the job was to move a load from here to there, all that was needed was a strong draft animal or two and a suitable harness to connect the animal to the load. However, converting an animal’s linear movement into rotary motion wasn’t as easy.

Probably the first machine that needed turning was the gristmill, developed in the Middle East in about 800 B.C. to grind flour. Fortunately, the gristmill was stationary and could be located next to a stream or river that furnished the driving power through a water wheel. Gristmills could also be turned by windmills. The first recorded instance was in Rome before the time of Caesar Augustus. When sawmills became popular, they too were usually located along a stream. Often a single entrepreneur would build a gristmill and a sawmill side by side and folks from the surrounding area would haul their grain and logs to him for processing.

Early power on the farm

When threshing machines became popular in Great Britain (during the late 1700s) and in America (by the 1820s) they were turned by hand, a tedious job that required much muscle and sweat. In 1826 it was said of Jacob Pope’s Massachusetts-built threshers that it was “harder work to turn the crank than to swing the flail.” Barns were seldom close enough to a stream to allow the use of a water wheel. While the occasional farmer might have a windmill to pump water, it wasn’t powerful or reliable enough to run a thresher.

In 1822, a man named Howe patented a thresher with a vertical cylinder that was driven by a tethered horse walking on a large circular platform. As the platform revolved, a belt around its circumference drove a pulley on the vertical shaft of the threshing cylinder. Supposedly, the endless-track treadmill tread power was invented in England in the 18th century to drive textile mills, reportedly with shackled prisoners providing the power, although most references I’ve found refer to water power. So treadmills weren’t new. Although slaves, prisoners and even children may have been used at times to run them, animals were the more popular source of power.

Most early “groundhog” threshers (early threshing machines consisting of a spiked cylinder and a fixed concave) were powered by a horse or an ox on a tread power but the new, combined thresher-fanning mills being developed by the Pitts brothers and others required more power than the old leather-belt treadmills could provide. The Pitts brothers (John and Hiram) made many improvements to the groundhog threshers of the day, including an improved treadmill patented by Hiram Pitts in 1830 that used iron tracks and rollers to support the wooden lags (or tread blocks).

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