A Cracker jack Steam Engineer

A Love of Steam Is Born

Dad was born August 14, 1881, in Avoca, Iowa, the only child of
Marius and Olina Mickelson.

He became interested in steam engines at an early age. When he
was still a small boy, his mother would send him to the butcher
shop to buy meat (usually about 25 cents worth of steak was
plenty). The butcher shop used a little steam engine for power to
run the sausage grinder and a steam boiler to heat water for
rendering lard. He watched fascinated as the machines worked.

In 1886 his parents purchased a farm in Shelby County, Iowa,
between Kirkman and Irwin. This farm, located on a green ridge,
became known as the Greenridge Farm. This is where Dad grew up.

His parents sent him to Capitol City Commercial College in Des
Moines for business courses. They were, no doubt, hoping he would
become interested in banking or business. However, the love of
steam won out, and after a year of college he returned home.

An Apprentice for Mr. Sonneland

At the age of 19 years, Dad started helping August Sonneland
operate a Huber steam threshing rig. In no time at all he caught on
how to operate the engine, fire the boiler, grease and oil the
parts, and keep the water level where it should be. He also learned
how to start and stop the engine while August tended to the
thresher. Back then Dad received one dollar a day for this work,
The ‘day’ began at 4:30 a.m. and sometimes went until after
dark.

They had many breakdowns, such as pitchforks and other things
going into the thresher. One of the breakdowns happened when they
were threshing a stack of oat bundles for a man by the name of Tobe
Olson. All at once August, who was on top of the thresher, waved
his hands to stop the engine. One of the pitchers lost his fork and
it hit the cylinder, causing quite a noise and dust. It bent some
of the teeth in the cylinder, and as they were straightening them
Carl mentioned that it was sure a good thing it didn’t break
the concave.

Carl Mickelson’s and Lars Axland’s 15 HP Rumely and
Buffalo Pitts thresher after installing a new Farmer’s Friend
blower and stacker.

August was a man with a quick temper. He turned to my dad and
said, ‘Break a concave? In a Huber? What are you talking about?
That would be impossible!’

‘Well,’ Carl replied, ‘it might have
happened.’

They fixed the problem, and August gave the ‘high sign’
to start. Dad gave two toots on the whistle and they began to
thresh. They hadn’t run five minutes when another big bang was
heard. The dust flew out of the front of the machine. August waved
his arms yelling at the top of his voice. Dad shut the throttle and
pulled the reverse to stop as soon as he could.

This time they found what caused the problem. A monkey wrench
had gone through, breaking the concave in half. Albert, Tobe’s
son, remarked, ‘Why, that’s our monkey wrench. Gosh,
I’m glad we found it! I noticed that wooden handle was gone.
That’s the only wrench we have!’

August was almost ready to explode, he was so angry.

Later I asked my dad if he said anything to August about the
concave not being breakable. He told me he didn’t dare, as
August would have fired him on the spot.

Another breakdown that could have been a bad one almost
happened.

August went in to eat breakfast while Carl stoked up the boiler.
He was beginning to get a head of steam when August came out to the
engine so Carl could go eat. Dad said when he came back to the
engine. August was taking the main bearing caps off. Dad said for a
while he didn’t dare to ask why. Soon they had everything loose
and, with the help of several men, lifted the crankshaft and
flywheel off.

The reason August took it apart was that as he started the
engine, he noticed the disc crank wasn’t running true. As
August barely tapped the disc it finished breaking the crankshaft
next to the disc. They thought they still had enough shaft and they
would just move the flywheel over and put the crank disc back on.
In the process, however, August hit the crank a hard lick, breaking
the disc. August had to order a new crankshaft and disc out of Des
Moines, which took a couple of days to get. After installing that,
they finally were back threshing once more.

Carl worked for August Sonneland several years. Those days it
was mostly stack threshing until late in November. Then it was to
go back home to pick corn.

Mr. Sonneland’s outfit was one of the first steam traction
engine outfits in its day, so it was very much in demand. Most of
the threshing done before was by horse power with a few portable
steam engines that had to be moved by several teams of horses.

After Mr. Sonneland sold his rig, Carl took jobs as engineer for
others, and learned to operate different makes and sizes of steam
traction engines, threshing and filling silos for several
years.

10 HP Russell Steam Traction Engine

In 1902 Carl became 21 years of age and his father, Marius, gave
him $100.00 for neither chewing nor smoking tobacco. With this
money Carl purchased a 10 HP Russell steam traction engine which he
located three miles west of Harlan, Iowa. He and his cousins, Enoch
and William Erickson, steamed it up in late summer and drove about
a mile and a half north to where the boys lived. Late that fall
they steamed it up to saw some wood. The wood they were burning was
wet, and they couldn’t keep up steam. Dad got several sacks of
cobs. Both Carl and his cousin, Enoch, had new blanket-lined
jackets. While working around the engine, pieces of red hot coals
got into their pockets. It nearly burned and practically ruined
both jackets.

They received $3.00 for the woodsawing job. Enoch kept $1.00 for
use of the buzzsaw and Carl got $2.00 for the use of the engine.
William worked all afternoon just for the fun of it. They drove the
engine back to the Erickson farm and drained the boiler.

Carl discovered the stay bolt was broken. He had never put in a
new stay bolt, so he had to find someone who could give him
instructions on how to remove the broken stay bolt and install a
new one. He drilled it out and threaded a bolt and replaced the
stay bolt with a new one.

One time the rear wheels froze down. He talked to August
Sonneland and together they came up with a way to get them loose
without breaking a bull pinion or gear. He built a fire in the
wheel.

Willie helped Carl when the weather got nice in the spring; he
drove a team with fuel and water while Carl drove his little 10
horse Russell from four miles west of Harlan to the Greenridge
farmclose to 20 miles that day. Carl had planned to pull his
comsheller with the Russell but decided it was too unhandy.

The engine sat in the yard by his blacksmith shop for some time.
Finally, Carl let a friend, Jasper Groat, who was a sort of
trader/dealer in threshers, swap it off. It was shipped out to
someone down east of Council Bluffs, perhaps Silver City.

About ten years ago an old Russell traction was found buried on
a farm by a friend of mine. He dug the boiler up and the wheels
out. He brought the boiler up north of here, about six miles. He
left the wheels, and another friend of mine down near the site of
the boiler bought them. He later advertised them in Iron Men Album.
It wasn’t long until a man from Kansas came by and took them
home, very pleased to find a set of wheels for his engine he was
restoring. (I wonder, could it have been the little 10 horse
Russell my dad bought with the $100 some 90 years ago?)

Buffalo Pitts Engine and Thresher

Finally, somewhere between 1908 and 1910, Carl and a farmer,
Lars Axland, purchased a Buffalo Pitts engine and thresher. It had
changed hands a couple of times, so it needed some repairs, which
they did over the next several years. During that time they
installed a new Farmer’s Friend blower and a new feeder on the
thresher.

Dad really liked the 18 horse Buffalo Pitts double cylinder
engine, but it used so much water that they traded it off for a
used 15 horse Rumely single cylinder engine. Later on it was
discovered that the Pitts engine had a steam feed pipe inside the
boiler that must have frozen and cracked. This fed wet steam into
the engine causing it to be very uneconomical.

The only Buffalo Pitts engine and thresher I have been able to
locate since I have been attending steam and gas antique shows is
up at the Western Minnesota Show at Rollag. The thresher is much
the same as Dad’s Pitts thresher, with the old blower that was
in sections and had to be put together. In fact, they weren’t
even round, but a sort of oval shape.

Also, the engine I believe was newer. It had round spokes
instead of flat spokes as on Dad’s engine. Perhaps it was the
other way as to the age between the two engines. Carl really liked
the Rumely as it was a powerful little engine, never light in front
because it was rear mounted.

A Threshing Story

The following threshing story was told to Carl and Lars. It
supposedly happened to another threshing crew. It seems like when
they threshed with the old hand fed threshers, the man who could
eat the most dust was considered a really tough person. A man was
bragging about feeding a thresher which was a Gaar Scott rig,
probably 10 or 12 horsepower with a 28 inch separator, which in
that day was a common size. This man claimed he was feeding the
machine so fast that the engineer came up to him, tapped him on the
shoulder and asked him to please slow down because he couldn’t
keep up steam. Lars asked the man why the engineer didn’t toot
the whistle so the man would slow down. The man said the engineer
would have, but he didn’t have enough steam!

33-54 Russell Thresher

A new Russell thresher, size 33-54, was purchased from Clark
Implement Company in 1915. Carl and Lars did not trade the old
Pitts thresher in, as they could use parts off of it for repairs on
the Russell if need be. The blower feeder and elevator were the
same. The new Russell thresher was shipped on the Great Western
Railroad to Irwin, Iowa, just three miles from where Carl lived and
where I live now.

The thresher was unloaded on the side track. They must have
pulled it off the flatcar with Charles’ team of Morgan horses,
a wonderful pulling team, named Carson and Nellie. Once it was off
the flat car, Carl put his team on the front of the thresher and
pulled it up Main Street, a pretty good incline, about a block to
the Green Bay Lumber Company building so it wouldn’t get wet if
it rained. Shortly after, they came to town with the Rumely 15 HP
and took it out to the first job, threshing at Cyrus Monson’s
farm, two miles south and a half east of Irwin. Carl and Lars
seemed to be well pleased with the Russell thresher. It was used
until the late 1930s. A couple of years, perhaps 1934-1936, were
dry years with a poor crop of oats. They left the rig in the
shed.

Shredding Corn in the Wintertime

In the winter of 1919 (approx.), four farmers, two sets of
brothers Cyrus and Pete Monson and Bruce and Thomas
Barrattpurchased a corn shredder. They had each cut a lot of corn
fodder that fall on their farms. In January, the dead of winter,
they hired Carl and Lars to bring the Rumely over to pull the
shredder. (How they could talk Dad into such a job I never could
figure out!) The mile road on the north side of our farm was
blocked with snow. They fired up the engine and headed out,
following the ridge, all the way taking down fences. When they had
to turn a corner, that required hooking a team of horses on the
front to make the turn.

Lars hauled the water. The teams of horses all had to be shod
with never-slip calks in the horseshoes so they could pull the
loads. The fodder shocks were frozen down and had to be chopped
loose with an axe or pulled loose with a team and a log chain
hooked around the shock of corn. The pipes on the engine and the
tank pump on the water tank would have to be heated with a steam
hose because they would freeze. After a day of shredding, the old
Rumely was covered with the canvas they used for the thresher
during the threshing run. I can’t remember how many days they
shredded corn as I was only four or five years old.

I do vividly remember Mother harnessing Carson and Nellie to the
bobsled, covering my two older brothers and me and our little fox
terrier dog with a horse blanket. We drove two and a half miles to
get Dad and bring him home after dark. The old bobsled didn’t
have grooved runners so, when going down some hills, the rear end
of the sled would try to pass the horses which made it really
exciting.

I remember one night it really got cold. The wind came up. Dad
began to worry that the engine would freeze. He got out of bed,
bundled up, and walked across the field a couple of miles to check
the fire even though he had the fire banked with lots of coal in
the firebox. Then he walked back across the field, nearly frozen, I
imagine.

The last job of com shredding, he leveled the engine up out in
the field, pulled the fire, and when the engine cooled down (which
probably didn’t take too long in the winter), he drained the
pipes, covered the stack, and slowly drained the boiler. It sat
there the rest of the winter. In the spring after the field dried
up, Carl and Lars went over and brought that old faithful piece of
iron back home.

For many years they threshed two runs a season, a shock run in
our neighborhood and a stack run in the next township north. The
stack run lasted almost until cornpicking time.

Finally one of the farmers in the run up north bought a small
thresher and pulled it with a 10-20 I.H.C. It did not go as fast,
but I think they were tired of stacking oats, especially the
younger guys. They shock-threshed from then on until the small
combine came into use.

Case 65 H.P.

Around 1920, Dad and Lars traded the old Rumely for a secondhand
Case, 65 HP. It had been purchased by a man over at Gray, Iowa, to
grade roads. In fact it graded the Lincoln Highway, now U.S.
Highway 30, from Carroll to Denison.

The engine was five years old. Outside of the gears being worn
and somewhat noisy, it would do a real good job of pulling the
33-54 Russell thresher. That was the first it had been used for
belt work. Then, when fall came, it really handled those ensilage
cutters, filling 80 foot silos without any trouble. Plenty of
power!

As the years passed, Dad taught me to run the steam engine. When
I was 24 years old, Dad left me alone while he went to town. A
couple of young fellows thought they would have some fun. They
lapped the bundles until the cutter stopped when the pipe plugged,
but NOT the 65.1 had pulled the reverse down in the corner and it
slipped the rubber belt on the covered pulley. That delayed the
filling for about an hour. They didn’t try that trick again,
especially after having to clean the pipe and scoop up the mess off
the ground.

This incident took place in September 1940. Up until then Dad
had threshed and filled silo every year, except the few dry years,
with the Case 65. In other words, he threshed all through the.
1920s and 1930s. The fall of 1940 was the last time the 65 was ever
steamed.

World War II Hits Home

On May 8, 1941, I received my call to enter the Army. The U.S.
Government called it ‘selective service.’ I was only
supposed to be in for one year’s training. It ended up I served
for five years and was stationed in California, Mississippi, Ohio.
Pennsylvania and overseas in New Guinea and the Philippine Islands.
I returned home in 1946.

During the period I was stationed in the States, I would get
furloughs for a couple of weeks at a time. While home I never
failed to go up and check out the Case 65.

While I was in the South Pacific, some torch-happy iron bandits
approached my dad regarding the selling of the 65 Case. They told
him that selling the engine for iron to be used in the war effort
would help bring his son home. I guess Dad didn’t realize the
love I had for that old hunk of iron from the time I was five years
old until I came back at age 30. In any event, Dad sold it.

These iron bandits, as I called them, used that story to prey on
many people whose children served during World War II. They got
their hands on many fine engines.

While I was in the service, Dad, even at the age of 70 , was
called on to help fire the boilers at the Harlan, Iowa, canning
factory, canning sweet corn for a few weeks in late summer.

In 1960 I arranged to fly Dad down to Mount Pleasant to the
Midwest Threshers Show. It was the last steam show he was to
attend. He passed away in 1964.

For the Love of Steam

In 1971 I traveled to Montana, where I purchased a 1915 50 HP
Case portable steam engine. It took me three and a half years to
restore it. This story was written up in the Iron Men Album in the
July/August 1975 edition, pages 14-20, entitled ‘Kirkman Man
Has Steam in His Blood, A Smile on His Face.’ The Greenridge
Steam and Gas Antique Club was born from the purchase of this
engine.

In 19851 began building a half-size M Rumely steam engine. The
story of this engine was featured on the back cover of Iron Men
Album in the January/February 1991 issue.

The Greenridge Steam and Gas Antique Club purchased a 65 Case in
1981, exactly like the one Dad owned. I have trained my son, Danny,
to operate it and my own engines. He enjoys running them at our
steam show every September. Danny, in turn, is teaching his son,
Kris, to operate the engines.

My son-in-law, Clark Ahrenholtz, also has the love of steam in
his blood. And why shouldn’t he? He is the great-grandson of
August Son-neland who taught Dad about steam engines and took him
on as an apprentice almost a century ago!

The farm where Dad grew up is now the sight of the annual
Greenridge Steam and Gas Antique Show held the third full weekend
in September. I still live on the north of Greenridge farm.