FARM STEAM ENGINEERS

Here were ingenious men, tough and resourceful, who in greasy
overalls coaxed their rusty engines around straw piles or sighted
their puffing dreadnoughts down the long furrows of the plains.
They were engaged in one of the most dramatic enterprises of
frontier life. As mechanical pioneers they were often ahead of the
times. Long before the appearance of tractors or automobiles, these
farm engineers had already demonstrated their independence. They
brought self-propelled steam engines which could climb hills,
reverse themselves, crawl out of mud holes and after a long
day’s work in the field could carry their master home for
supper.

When the wealthy aristocrat in the city was still confined to
the horse and buggy, the common farmer was chuffing across the
fields and roads of the countryside in a private, self-propelled
machine.

Who were these barnyard mechanics? Why is their work worthy of
recollection?

Historically, the early farm engineers predate the railroad
engineers. In England, George Stephenson’s first locomotive ran
in 1813; in America, the ‘Stourbridge Lion’ made the first
successful run in 1829. The following year Peter Cooper’s
‘Tom Thumb’ gained fame on the Baltimore and Ohio railroad.
But meanwhile, steam engines had been installed on several Southern
plantations as early as 1807, the year in which Robert Fulton made
his historic trip up the Hudson River in the ‘Claremont.’
While Stephenson, Cooper and Fulton received world renown for
bringing steam power to transportation and commerce, apparently no
one noticed that rural Americans had already started a revolution
of their own by applying steam power to agriculture. Levi Woodbury,
Secretary of the Treasury, issued a report in 1838 revealing that
prior to 1830 it had become rather common place for planters to
purchase stationary steam engines for threshing rice, sawing wood,
ginning cotton and grinding cane in the sugar mills. Niles Weekly
Register in 1836 predicted that ‘in a few years, steam power
will be applied to such a variety of purposes that the horse, or
the ox will be no longer required.’

The first farm steam engineers worked in the South where the
rapidly expanding rural economy encouraged planters to purchase the
most modern machinery on the market. Frederick Law Olmsted once
described these plantation owners as ‘the most intelligent,
enterprising and wealthy men of business in the United States.’
When water, wind and mule power proved inadequate, these men
imported 16-horsepower Fawcett engines from Liverpool which cost
$7000 each. Bolted down to solid foundations and belted to line
shafts, they drove the various plantation machines. Chimneys as
high as 50 feet provided draft for the fireboxes where wood, coal
or dried bagasse were used for fuel. Overseers and negro slaves
supervised the engines.

In spite of the traditional reliance upon manual labor, the use
of steam power gained in popularity. By 1850 most of the larger
plantation owners depended upon engines for ginning cotton,
threshing, and other belt work. Thus the notion that all Southern
planters sat in the shade of white mansions reading Walter Scott
and drinking mint julips while all the slaves in the image of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin bent under the lash in the cotton fields needs
revision. Planters favored slave labor, it is true, but it should
be remembered that they were among the most mechanically-minded
people in the country. Eager to learn more about machinery, they
introduced power farming to America, a move destined eventually to
remove the back-breaking work for laborers in both North and
South.

Following the Civil War, farm steam engineers helped develop
large-scale farming in the Midwest. Immigrants succumbed to clever
newspaper advertising such as ‘Come West to a land flowing with
wine and honey,’ and ‘In Paradise Regained the corn grows
14 feet tall with 5 ears to the stalk.’ However, life on a
homestead could be dull and the work insufferably tedious. Steel
plows broke up the virgin prairie sod, but the slow ox teams guided
by the conventional !’Gee’ and ‘Haw’ left much to
be desired. Horses provided more speed although they suffered under
the strain until many farmers longed for the invention of iron
steeds which could defy this arduous work in the heat, dust and
flies. Horse power for threshing grain likewise revealed a power
shortage because they could not thresh out more than 900 bushels a
day.

Determined to secure a better source of power, farmers
encouraged the manufacture of portable steam engines mounted on
wheels which could be moved about with horses. A. L. Archambault of
Philadelphia built the first of these in 1849. Scores of other
companies soon sold engines of similar design. These developed 10
to 20 horsepower, cost about $1000 and were used for power on the
belt. To pay for them, owners did custom work, often threshing the
grain for 20 to 30 neighbors. Thus threshermen became more than
ordinary farmers.

These engineers took pride in their ability for they were
usually the only men in a rural community capable of operating an
engine. Farm families depended upon them to thresh their grain
before inclement weather ruined the shocks in the field.

The novelty of steam engines cast special attention upon the
engineers. Folks frequently turned out to watch the unloading of an
engine at the railroad station, curious to get a better view of
these metal beasts with muscles of steel. As the engines were not
self-propelled prior to 1875, the owner hitched a team of horses to
the trucks and moved through the streets in triumphal fashion. On
the seat bolted to the boiler, the engineer sat enthroned.

A successful engineer exhibited a variety of skills. He was
boss. He gave orders to threshing crews, hired and fired men, set
threshing rates, repaired machinery, looked after the safety of all
concerned, and directed one of the largest group activities in farm
life. On the job he acted with authority in lining up the engine to
the threshing machine, getting up steam, cleaning the boiler,
dropping sperm oil into the bearings or applying beef tallow to the
cylinder valves. With a firm hand on the throttle, he let the
engine settle down to a steady motion coughing along to a rhythmic
‘tuck-a-tuck’ from the exhaust.

Naturally children idolized the engineer, seeing in his work the
fullfillment of their own desires. Many youngsters skipped school
to see a thresherman in action and to dream of the day when they
would become one of the elite. Adults too, were impressed by the
spectacle, traveling miles to watch the early engines at work.
These iron horses loaded with a bellyful of fire and belching forth
smoke, steam and sparks commanded respect. An engineer living near
Hell Gate, Montana Territory in 1870 reported that since railroads
had not reached that section of the country, ‘your engine is a
rare sight in these mountains. Some of the old mountaineers have
come down the valley and camped for two or three days to see the
engine and to hear the steam whistle.’

An element of bigness featured the development of the American
Westa sense of grandeur which comes in doing things on a vast,
unprecedented scale. The giganticism in railroading, ranching and
mining affected agriculture as well. Agrarian engineers encouraged
this expansion by purchasing large 16-horsepower engines to drive
the threshing machines on the bonanza farms in the major wheat
growing states. Here the magnitude of operations reveals some of
the Paul Bunyan traits in the men of steam. It was not child’s
play. Oliver Dalrymple in 1884 used 30 engines to thresh 30,000
acres of wheat on his farm in the Red River Valley of Dakota. A
storekeeper near Casselton counted 53 engines in nearby fields
threshing hard spring wheat. The steam rigs scattered among the
congested grain shocks made an impressive sight. In the early
morning a burst of white steam sounded the whistle and a few
minutes later the hum of threshing floated across the prairies on
the billows of golden wheat. As a thresher devoured the bundles in
its rapacious maw, the grain poured out at the rate of 1,200
bushels a day.

The wheat ranches in the Sacramento valley of California
provided scenes even more spectacular. Dr. Hugh J. Glenn used six
steam engines to thresh a million bushels of wheat from his 66,000
acre farm in Calousa County. Regarding Eastern threshing outfits as
toys, he ordered his blacksmith, George Hoag, to build a mammoth
separator 35 feet long. This machine belted to an Enright engine,
threshed 5,779 bushels of wheat on August 8, 1874. Five years
later, the Glenn set a world record by threshing over 6,000 bushels
in one day. The Willows Journal reported:

‘At sunrise Wednesday morning the whistle from the ponderous
engine sounded the signal for the grand onslaught upon the sea of
yellow grain. Ten headers and 36 header-wagons and an abundance of
willing hands moved simultaneously with the machinery and nought
could be heard but the hum of the massive separator and the rattle
and noise necessary among so many men, mules and headers. Four
spouts poured out a continuous stream of golden grain. Four men
attended to the sacks and four did the sewing …. At sunset the
official count of the sacks was made, the total being 6,183 bushels
of wheat cut, threshed and garnered from sun to sun. This showing
we believe is unprecedented in the annals of farming in the
civilized world.’

Farm engineers had their heyday during the steam engine boom
from 1880 to 1914. Since steam remained the only practical source
of mechanical power available for general farm use during the 19th
century, the farmer’s demands for it increased. In 1880 a total
of 1,200,000 steam horsepower served agricultural purposes; in 1910
the figure reached 3,600,000 horsepower, an amount equal to the
strength of 7,000,000 horses. At this time the Department of
Agriculture estimated that 100,000 engineers were operating
self-propelled steam engines for threshing, plowing, grading roads,
grinding feed, hauling freight and moving buildings.

The ‘old timers’ who singed their whiskers around steam
threshing rigs 50 years ago will never forget these days of great
responsibility. With thousands of dollars invested in machinery,
mismanagement, break downs or bad weather might turn profits into
staggering losses. Every hour’s work counted. Enterprising
firemen blew the morning whistle at four o’clock to rouse
workmen for the day. One thresherman insisted he worked a nine-hour
day: nine hours in the forenoon and nine in the afternoon. An
engineer who broke his arm in the drive belt refused to leave his
post saying that threshing was no time to be laid up. Another whose
wife died was said to have announced that he was too busy to attend
the funeral because ‘threshing comes but once a year, but a
wife can be secured at any time.’

Farm engineers staged colorful performances with new engines
glistening in bright paintred wheels, black boilers, green
trimmings and shining brass. The leviathans weighed up to 20 tons,
developed 100 horsepower, consumed 70 barrels of water daily and
cost as much as $6,000. The Best and Holt engines on the Pacific
coast had driving wheels 12 feet in diameter which could outpull 40
mules. With a grain combine on the draw-bar, they could harvest 100
acres of wheat daily. Here were undoubtedly the most awe-inspiring
machines used in agriculture.

After 1900, steam traction engines pulling 10 to 14 breaker
bottoms ripped up much of the virgin sod lying from the Canadian
provinces to Texas. Grasslands once the home of Indians,
jack-rabbits and bison, were rolled over and planted to flax and
other cereal crops. Edwin Haselhorst on a June morning in 1909
counted the smoke columns of 10 plowing engines breaking the
prairie sod near Millard, South Dakota. The Dakota Farmer reported
these juggernauts plowing up whole townships each week.

The men behind the throttle added zest to farm life by steaming
into farmer’s yards scattering children, barking dogs and
chickens. Farm families flew into action in preparation for the
invasion of threshing crews which often numbered 25 men. Eligible
women looked over the hired hands. Missouri ‘Pete’, Texas
‘Slim’ and Oklahoma ‘Bill’ intending to follow the
thresher each year often ended their nomadic life by marrying the
farmer’s daughter and becoming a permanent part of the rural
community. Each fall, the farmer’s wives vied with one another
to set the best table. The speed with which a thresher could finish
off a drumstick was a sight to cheer the heart of any cook. The
chewing of corn off the cob and the gulping of coffee resounded
from the dining table as a rhapsody of almost orchestral
quality.

In contrast to the romantic, the steam engine crowd faced the
serious aspects of threshing, such as the personal risks involved
on the job. A glove caught in the flywheel could jerk an arm from
the socket. Steam at 300 degrees inflicted painful burns. Exposed
gears, pulleys, belts and shafts permitted about as much safety as
a buzz saw. Wooden bridges at times collapsed, plunging the driver
into the river below to be crushed or drowned. Boiler explosions
snuffed out lives with as many as six men killed in a single blast.
One thresherman cynically fumed that an engineer slaughtered in an
explosion was regarded with about as much sympathy as a dead dog.
Sparks from the stack created serious fire hazards. For instance,
the Daily News of Aberdeen, South Dakota on September 30, 1905,
reported that the city was nearly surrounded by four fires started
by threshing engines. The following week a prairie fire of similar
origin near Leola, South Dakota, swept across a 12-mile front
burning farm buildings and livestock.

Personal discomfort added to the engineer’s woes. On torrid
summer days the heat from the firebox, hot as hades, made working
conditions almost intolerable. In addition, repair jobs
necessitated working far into the night in the dim glow of a
kerosene lantern. Irregular hours meant irregular meals; at times
only cold leftovers greeted them. A dejected engineer writing to
the Thresherman’s Review in 1898 complained:

‘Allow me to say that the most dreadful days of my life have
been spent in connection with threshing machinery…. I have arose
at three o’clock in the morning, tore out the side of a sod
house for kindling, walked three miles and started a fire in the
dearest engine this side of the Mississippi. The boys would bring
me my breakfast of soda biscuit and sow belly. I have walked
majestic and solemn at midnight and drank water that would make an
engine foam in fifteen minutes. I have burned Leavenworth coal . .
. and have shouted ‘Come on boys, help us tighten the
belt,’ until I have about lost faith in mankind and fell in
love with the hired girl because she had on a clean apron.’

In late autumn, these horny-handed sons shared the hardships of
the threshing crews, sleeping in straw piles, barns and hen coops
and wrapped in horse blankets or buffalo robes to ward off the
cold. Franz Wood of Des Moines recalled operating a rig in sub-zero
weather with snow on the ground. ‘We didn’t have time to
stop for anything. My boots were all worn out. My toes protruded
through the ends of them into the snow playing peek-a-boo with each
other . . .’

To be successful, the steam fraternity needed managerial skill
as well as technical knowledge. It required sound judgment to go
into town and hire reliable bundle haulers from the gangs of
migratory workers, hoboes and I.W.W.’s who rode westward on the
railroad blink baggage. Many of the floaters, exposed to card
sharks, bootleggers, hijackers, tramps and prostitutes, were as
tough as the engineers themselves. To forge this motley crowd into
a hard-working, cooperative threshing crew demanded some insight
into the psychology of human nature. Encouragement must be provided
to keep men on the job who were expected to heave bundles all day
in 100-degree weather till their shirts dripped black with sweat
and their eyes reddened from the windblown dust of the stubble
field.

Besides, financial worries harassed the threshermen. How could
mortgages on his machinery be lifted with threshing rates at four
cents a bushel for feed grains and nine cents for wheat? When rains
stopped work, or farmers defaulted on payment of thresh bills, life
became grim. In this stiff competition many went bankrupt, some
broke even and a few escaped with whole hides.

However, it is a misconception to assume that all ‘iron
men’ radiated virtue, humility and love for neighbor and the
Almighty. Among the less angelic were indolent barnyard blacksmiths
disguised as threshing experts and the bob tail and rag tail who
were one jump ahead of the sheriff. Some bought engines with no
intention of paying for them, others put their property in their
wive’s name to avoid collection, many signed promissory notes
which were no more binding than if they had been written on straw
stacks and a few drove off collecting agents with black snake whips
and bull dogs. One collector lamented, ‘He refused to pay and
told me to go to a place reputed to be warmer than this one.’
In rare instances sabatoge occurred, when unscruplous engineers
tried to ruin competitors by placing dynamite in the boiler flues
of a rival thresherman.

These loquacious loafers rolled off some of the most mellifluous
profanity and bald-faced lies ever to echo across the bleak
prairies. Occasionally one of these big-mouth roisters tried to
subdue the earth. He would steam on to a farmer’s place as if
he owned it, fill the barn with horses, let his men smoke in the
hay, raid the garden, the hen coop and feed bin without permission,
keep a card game going each night, blow dirt into the water tank
and grain into the straw stack, cuss everything and everybody and
finally pull out, much to the relief of the farmer and his
family.

Yet, steam engineers enjoyed their work and most of them stopped
threshing with reluctance. Facetiously, a retired thresherman had
to be blindfolded whenever a new rig passed his house to prevent
him from dashing to town to mortgage his home to buy another
outfit. This temptation kept others tossing awake at night until in
the morning the bed looked like the scene of a recent dog fight.
The men admitted they were victims of the ‘threshing
fever,’ or that they had ‘thrashin’ in their blood, a
disease which defied the Keeley cure. Evidently steam men were
influenced by many sensations such as the smell of live steam
passing over an oily boiler, the sizzle of the injector, the curt
barks from the smokestack, the gyrating governor balls, the sight
of the feeder hogging through bundles until the thresher blower
spouted black dust against the horizon, the farmer dipping his
hands into the grain like a miser enjoying his gold, the final
whistle and the driving belt flopping to a standstill as the last
plume of smoke drifted into the clouds. All this conveyed a sense
of accomplishment and well being to the men who pioneered to bring
the iron horse to the farm.

This wistful spirit is revealed in the report of an American
Thresherman correspondent who approached an old steam operator to
inquire why he remained on the job year after year. The wiry codger
was squinting his eye along the edge of the flywheel to line up the
engine with the separator. He cut the throttle, wiped his hands on
his greasy overalls, shifted his cud of tobacco, expectorated
copiously and replied:

‘Well, sir, I recon I have sworn off this durn thrashin
business a hundred times. Every year I say, ‘Well, this is my
last,’ but it ain’t. It ain’t money. Lordy knows you
don’t get rich running a threshing outfit. Hustles me to break
even lots of times. I recon I just naturally have a hankering to be
oily and greasy and covered with dust and be jawed at and work all
day and half the night. That must be it. I swear off and durn if I
ain’t crazy as a kid just as the threshing season
starts.’

Eventually the gasoline tractor killed off the steam engine but
not until these rugged monsters had provided power for farmers for
over a century. Charles W. Hart and Charles H. Parr in 1901 built
their first successful tractor in Charles City, Iowa. There had
been experimental tractors before this time, but the early
Hart-Parr engines were the first tractors to run successfully and
to be manufactured in quantity. During the First World War, the
growing popularity of the small tractor curtailed the demand for
steam engines. In 1920 only 1700 of them were sold and 1925 marks
the end of this type of manufacture.

In retrospect, however, the significance of the farm steam
engineer in American life goes beyond a visceral nostalgia for the
good old days. Awake to new ideas, these foresighted men encouraged
others to reject the horse and accept the new era of mechanical
agriculture. Believing that you can’t fix a dead horse with a
monkey wrench, they gained first-hand knowledge of high speed
engines, lubricants, gear systems, crankshafts, flywheels, and
reciprocating cylinders.

North Dakota State College trained 7,000 farm boys to operate
steam traction engines. Later they applied their mechanical
abilities to running tractors and over-hauling the Model T Ford.
These skills served the armed forces in two World Wars suggesting
that rural lads had received a home training which was based upon a
long tradition of farmers who had loved to tinker with
machinery.

Frederick Jackson Turner saw the frontiersmen as ‘people
with a practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients,
and a masterful grasp of material things.’ J. B. Davidson of
Iowa State College in 1913 observed that farming had become more
technical so that a good farmer must ‘become a skilled
engineer.’ John Koewenhowen in Made in America concludes that
‘the American’s affection for machinery has always been an
outstanding characteristic.’

Any careful estimate of the rural engineers will destroy the
easy generalizations of some who look upon farmers of yesterday as
ignorant lunkheads, strong of vertebrae but so weak in mind that
they didn’t know whether they were the backbones or boneheads
of the nation. These sons of the sod with their red necks, pitch
forks and corn cob pipes might appear to be plodders far behind the
times, yet among them were those of mechanical ingenuity,
self-reliant and progressive.

Today the steam engine brigade view the passing of their
fabulous era with regret. To recapture a bit of the atmosphere of
bygone days, these men exchange collections of steam engine
catalogues or attend threshing bees where the relics of the past
are demonstrated. Here the veterans thrill to the sight, sound and
smell of the engines once sold by such well known companies as
Case, Reeves, Huber, Frick, Geiser, Russell, Minneapolis, Avery,
Rumely, Gaar-Scott, Aultman-Taylor and Nichols and Shepard. Perhaps
it is the fate of these farm engineers that their names are not
famous yet, life for them was full of rich experiences in an out
door job they liked and in an enterprise of inestimatable
value.