464 South 5th St. Sebewaing, Michigan 48759
Caption for this picture from an old catalog reads: ‘The
above cut represents the left hand side of our 36 x 48 Steel Pea
and Bean Huller showing how it is belted and with a Banting Feeder
and Gearless Wind Stacker attached.
The Keck Gonnerman Bean & Pea thrashers came into our area
thrashing beans than any other make. What a nice machine it was to
runI’ve had three of them.
Starting about 1944 there were a lot of the bean machines, not
only Kecks, but Hubers, Birdwells, Avery grain machines, and
McCormick Deering grain machines changed over to what we called
‘pickup beaners.’ They picked up the beans right from the
windrows in the fields.
Keck Gonnerman shipped the machines to a man named Martin at Bad
Axe, Michigan. He converted them to be pickup beaners, and they
were called Keck Gonnerman Martin Specials.
So, a few years later after Keck Gonnerman quit building
beaners, Martin built the complete beaner at Bad Axe, Michigan.
But, as time moved on, the big self-propelled combines took over
and Martin quit building the Keck Gonnerman Martin Special
beaner.
The last pickup beaner that Martin built was sold to a man in
Canada. My dad helped Martin take it to Canada and the year was
1961 or 1962.
