A Threshing Story

Reader Contribution by Sam Moore
Published on January 4, 2016
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While leafing through some old The American Thresherman magazines in my collection I found the following letter in the June 1924 issue. The following recollections were written by E.L. Vincent, but there’s no address given for him.

How We Used to Thresh

I went down to the barn the other day and looked at the first threshing machine we ever had on the place. It was an old flail, made by hand, with a stout strip of eelskin to hold the two pieces of wood together. As I looked at that old weapon, I thought back to the days when I whaled away with it on many a flooring of grain, especially buckwheat and beans. More than once I used to whack myself with the crude affair, and I always got more dust up my nose than I did beans or buckwheat on the floor.

After threshing was over, we had a great time cleaning the grain. That was real fun and the boys enjoyed turning the crank of the old fanning mill while I shoveled the dirty grain in and took up the clean grain from the back of the mill. We were not in a hurry; time wasn’t as valuable as it is now, nor was help as scarce or as high-priced.

When I was about nine my father built a new barn, and while he was putting up a frame house in place of the log cabin we had lived in previously, we moved into the nice barn, which was clean as could be. We had our living rooms in the stable with the big barn floor for a parlor. But threshing time came while were in the barn and we had some fun fixing up for that event.

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