706 Pennsylvania Avenue, Mendota, Illinois 61342.
These three pictures are of filling the same silo about every
ten years apart on the George Althaus farm, located on the old
Chicago-Galesburg Road, Sublette Twp., Illinois, one mile west of
the Henkel Bridge on U.S. 52 over the Illinois Central Railroad,
northwest of Mendota, Illinois.
From Steam to Diesel. The first picture is taken in October,
1920 with Theo. Schmitz Gaar-Scott-Rumely steam engine belted to an
Ohio in silage cutter. Teddy is on his engine minding his business
as it took lots of power to run this hard pulling Ohio Cutter and
blow the silage up to the top of this silo. This was a high silo
for its day. It was built in 1918 when World War I was in full
swing and is still there.
The next picture was taken in September. 1931 using a 1926 John
Deere, Model ‘D’, and a 16-inch International In silage
Cutter, which was the flywheel type and pulled much easier than the
old Ohio lawn mower type did. It didn’t do quite as good a job
cutting the silage, though. They wanted to use their own tractor
instead of the steam engine and burn distillate or kerosene instead
of coal.
The third picture is a Caterpillar Diesel ‘D2’ belted to
the same International 16 inch cutter in September 1939. Then, by
now we could fill that silo with less than a 20-gallon tank of
Diesel fuel. Notice the team of horses. My dad always had lots of
good Belgian horses. The team on the smaller (second) picture is a
team of Percheron horses. Now there is a bigger, higher silo
besides this one and took only two days to put it there, as
compared to the old silo built in World War I that took two months
to build.
