RECOLLECTIONS OF A LEGEND

for Case engines and machines which has thrived for 70 years. Walt
Spreeman remembers. He is a living and breathing product of western
Canada’s agricultural (& Case) heritage and has some
vintage photos to prove it! by Walter Spreeman

The name ‘CASE’ has thrilled me since I was a little boy
and sat on Dad’s old 1908 25-75 engine while he threshed every
fall. Engine No. 19924 and a 36-58 thresher did the job for him.
Dad told me both this engine and the separator were in the Calgary
Alberta Fair in 1908.

My Dad, Allan Spreeman, was born in 1882 in Ontario, Canada. He
had a Robert Bell Steam Engine there which he used on the corn
cutters they used to fill the 40-foot tall silos and also did
threshing. It was all barn threshing in those days in Ontario. The
shocks were hauled into the large barns and could be threshed any
time all winter. The threshing machine was backed right into the
barn and the straw carriers elevated the straw to a vacant part of
the loft. The boys had to keep the straw away from the carrier and
tramp it. What a hot, dusty job that was for young fellows! The men
fed the machine and one was a band cutter. No automatic feeders or
blowers in those days!

Dad went west in 1906. In Alberta, steam engineers needed a
license so Dad had to write for his. He never got out of grade two
in school as he had to work. His mother had died when he was four
years old and his stepmother was pretty tough to live with (she had
caused the death of her first husband by pouring hot water on him.
He was sick and in bed for a few days and she got the idea that he
was lazy and not sick. He was dead in two days).

Dad got his license, he told the inspector he had only gone as
far as grade two. I still have the Class 3 engineer ticket.

Ed Weber, who farmed near Didsbury, Alberta, bought a new Case
25-75 steam engine (No. 19924) and a 36-58 threshing machine in the
fall of 1908 and hired Dad as engineer. They burned straw that fall
and Ed Weber was the fireman. I still have Dad’s time books
showing they threshed 84 days. It got down to 20 degrees below
zero, so they had trouble keeping the ice out of the water tank
used to haul water for the engine. The snow also rolled up on the
engine drive wheels, so they had trouble moving.

Dad homesteaded in 1910 on land in eastern Alberta, but came
west every fall to thresh. During the winter, he also ran the steam
engine in the Rosebud flour mill, which Ed Weber’s brother
built.

However, by 1915 the homesteaders were getting a lot of land
broken up and that year they had a lot of rain in the dry east
country, so Dad and three other farmers bought Ed Weber’s Case
threshing outfit for $2,000.00 and had it shipped 200 miles east.
They had a big run that fall and threshed into December. They
called themselves ‘The Big Four’! Sad to say, his three
partners weren’t mechanically minded. Dad had one of them go
out in later years to steam the engine up but he didn’t check
the water level which was low because a valve had been damaged by
frost and water had leaked out of the boiler. The crown sheet was
damaged and a lot of stay bolts leaked, so no threshing was done
that day or perhaps all week as they had to call a boilermaker out
from town to repair it. He had come 17 miles one way, and remember
this took place in the horse and buggy days.

1916 was another good year and my uncle, who was a good
blacksmith, and my cousin came from Ontario to help with the fall
run.

I was born in July 1917, and my first memories of harvesting
were in 1921. By 1924, Dad had bought out one of the ‘Big
Four’ shareholders and had a good run every day threshing for
10 to 12 neighbors. As I grew older, I’d always try to stay
home from school when they threshed at our place and Dad even let
me fire a bit. We burned coal in those years but, in 1924, they
burned straw in the steamer. One evening after a wet spell, Dad and
my brother and me got out to fire the engine so the water would be
hot and wouldn’t take so long for the fireman to get steam up
in the morning. When firing with coal, steam can be kept overnight
by banking the fire, but not with straw; so the fireman has to
start early. In our area of Canada, even when the days were short
in October and November, threshing started at 6:00 a.m., which was
way before sunrise. They had been threshing with flax straw which
is oily and burns with a terrific heat. The outfit was near home
and, after a short time, Dad came out to see what we were doing and
we had 75 pounds of steam and blew the whistle, which surprised my
Dad. Pretty good for two seven and nine year olds!

In the fall of 1926, threshing started the first part of
September, but after one day’s threshing there was a snow storm
which stopped all threshing. However, that was unusual in western
Canada and the September snow always goes away and October quite
often was (and still is) threshing month.

Allen Spreeman, my father, and Ed Weber, fireman in December
1908 with 25-75 engine No. 19924 and 36-58 thresher new that fall,
when they had an 84-day threshing run at Didsbury, Alberta.

Ed Weber and my father watching me thresh during the fall of
1946, using the same 1908 36-58 thresher run by my 1922 65 Case
Steamer.

The 1908 Case 25-75 pictured in 1916 after Dad bought the outfit
from Ed Weber and shipped it to eastern Alberta, where he
homesteaded in 1910. My cousin Chester and Uncle Simon are on the
engine.

In 1926, Dad bought a barn 10 miles from the farm and moved it
on four big wagons by the 25-75 Case. Here they are, headed for its
new ‘home.’

Same barn and engine, 10 years later when I was old enough to do
some steaming … grinding feed grain; I’m in the center with
my brother firing (with straw)

In eastern Alberta, many of the farmers had homesteaded in the
early days around 1910, getting land that really didn’t cost
anything if they would live on it for six months of the year. Many
lived in sod shacks, but eventually hauled in lumber and built
houses and good barns. Some, however, got discouraged and, because
of dry years and poor crops, moved away, leaving their buildings.
One of these, a farmer named Jim Buyers, who farmed 10 miles south
of Dad’s place, sold Dad a quarter section of land with
buildings and all for $500.00. The big hip-roofed barn was nearly
new, which was what Dad wanted, so, during the wet spell in the
fall of 1926, Dad borrowed four of the heavy wagons some of the
neighbors had for hauling grain and, on a Saturday morning, we
drove the 10 miles south with the engine and five wagons, one being
the coal wagon. What a pleasant Saturday it was. Dad never worked
on Sunday, but, on Monday morning, he and several of the neighbors
went to the barn, jacked it up with Dad’s jack (a Case jack, by
the way), loaded it on telephone poles they chained under the wagon
axles and moved it four miles the first day. Sad to say, I was too
young to help, so I had to go back to school, but I can still
remember Tuesday when, getting out of country school, I saw the
30-foot-high red barn approaching our farm. We didn’t waste
much time getting home that day. They unloaded it onto blocks, took
the wagons back to the owners and started threshing again the next
morning.

1927 was a wet year with a heavy crop, but fall weather was bad
and a lot of farmers didn’t get their crops threshed until the
spring. Dad finished his run except for one small farmer, whose
crop he threshed in May 1928. I had a bad cold, so stayed home from
school but that didn’t keep me off the good old Case
steamer.

Threshing days in the years 1946 through 1960, using my Acme
sheaf loader and three 10 x 20 racks… I needed only seven men to
thresh up to 300 bushels of wheat per hour and still used the 1908
36-58 thresher and the 1922 65 HP steamer.

Since many farmers had crops out all winter in 1927, they
decided to buy their own threshing machines in the fall of 1928,
since many of them now had gas tractors. So, that fall was
Dad’s last steam run. He even bought a gas tractor in 1928, and
that’s the year the dry and hungry 30’s started.

How I longed for steam threshing in my teens. In the fall of
1938, we threshed our crop and the crops of three neighbors. This
was grain all cut with a header which doesn’t bind the grain.
We left the dry country that year. My dad got $1,000.00 for all of
his land with good buildings and that wasn’t even cash. He took
a car in trade. We moved to Olds, Alberta, near the town of
Didsbury where Dad had come originally when he left Ontario. We
rented one and a half sections of land, and I started threshing
again but not with steam. The old 25-75 was finally dismantled. Dad
gave the boiler to a religious campground to supply steam and hot
water to the kitchen, so it had a good ending.

We made many trips from our old farm in eastern Alberta to our
new place at Olds, even hauled the 36-58 threshing machine the 200
miles on our 1-ton truck. We always passed a farm on the way over
which had a 65 Case steamer in the yard. It looked like new with
the original paint still on it.

Simon Megli was the owner and he had quite a threshing run for
many years; but, when World War II started, men to help with
harvesting were getting scarce and combines took over much of the
work. As a result, Megli hauled the engine west of Olds about 40
miles to the timber country and sawed lumber with it for several
winters and eventually sold it to another lumberman, who sawed with
it for another year or two. Then I heard it was for sale for
$200.00. I wrote the owner a letter enclosing a check for $175.00
and he accepted it. I still have the cancelled check. This was in
the fall of 1945; and we steamed the engine up, driving it home a
distance of about 50 miles.

That fall I couldn’t get good steam coal, so I used the
tractor for threshing but, in the fall of 1946, I got part of a
carload of coal and we threshed for 24 days. That year I also got
an Acme shock loader (or ‘stook loader,’ as we say in
Canada). The loader was designed to be pulled by four horses; but I
put a tractor on it, mounted it on rubber and built three 10 x 20
racks, so that I could thresh up to 300 bushels of wheat per hour
with only seven men, including myself. I ran the engine and looked
after the thresher all by myself. Case machines are so simple and
trouble-free this can be done by one person.

I had a book printed many years earlier on steam engines giving
accounts of all steam traction engines. The remarks on the Case
engine has never left my memory because the words were so true
‘These are the simplest engines made and are the easiest for
the novice to run; and they are made of the best materials
throughout.’

The fall of 1958, while going down a steep hill to a
neighbor’s little field to thresh for him, the rear wheel of
the thresher went into a depression and. because I was going at an
angle, the good old 36-58 1908 thresher rolled over. Well, I soon
got the steamer unhooked, turned it around and pulled the machine
back up on its wheels. The thresher wasn’t hurt that much, but
one shaft was bent and I called it quits for that fall.

The next fall, our crop was badly damaged by hail but, in 1960,
I found a dandy late model 40-62 Case threshing machine for sale
and bought it. I used this machine until my threshing days came to
a sudden stop in 1971. Since I had been a pilot during World War
II, I kept on doing some flying. I had a nice Bonanza plane and a
landing strip on the farm. I did some spraying, flying one
neighbor’s spray plane; but one afternoon after not getting
enough sleep, I hit a power line crossing a field, and that was the
end of the plane and nearly of me. I was smashed up externally and
internally, and the doctor told my wife that he didn’t think
I’d make it. I lost my memory for a month and was in a
wheelchair for a year; but my memory returned and my love for Case
steam engines and equipment continues as strong as ever. The 65
Case is in good hands Glen Crandall of Ponoka, Alberta bought it
from me and also has my dandy Case thresher stored in his shed.

I’ve stepped up from handling a 65 Case to the famous
110’s, driving those owned by Kenneth Kelley (in Pawnee,
Oklahoma) and Joe Richardson (in Orofino, Idaho). Both of these
110’s came from Alberta, Canada, and are beauties. In the late
40’s and early 50’s the engine Kenneth Kelley now has sawed
lumber not too far from where I got my 65. What a beautiful sound
to hear the Case 110 ‘talk’ when the log hit the sawit
could be heard for miles on those clear, cold winter days when
temperatures were down to 30 degrees below zero.

Western Canada certainly was ‘Case Steam Engine
Country.’ After getting discharged from the Canadian Air Force,
I ran an ad for steam engines in the Western Producer, a weekly
farm paper printed in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I received around 25
replies. All but two or three were from owners of Case engines who
had quit steam threshing years before.

Not many Canadian engines were cut up for scrap during the war.
The 110’s went to sawmills in northern Saskachewan (where the
Smolik Brothers got theirs) and to the timber country in western
and northern Alberta (where Joe Richardson’s 110 came from).
Many also were shipped to British Columbia after the steam
threshing and plowing era came to an end. There, three Case
110’s were founds ad to say, without wheels and traction parts
in the Salmon Arm Area. They were all of the latest model of
110’s built in 1913. I located a dandy 80 Case in the same
area, although its traction parts were missing except for one
wheel. The other wheel is out in the lake, placed there to anchor a
cable at the mill site.

The latest and best engines have been found in Canada because
some of its regions were among the last in North America to be
settled and the demand for engines continued there until the
1920’s. My 65 was built in 1922, but it sold new in 1925. A 110
Case I’d love to own was built in 1912 but sold new in 1917,
the year I was born.

Western Canada certainly owes a lot of its progress to the J.I.
Case Company of Racine, Wisconsin. One man who broke up thousands
of acres in southern Alberta owned five 110’s.

As a boy and even at my age today, the name ‘Case’
causes my heart to beat faster whenever I see it written or even
spoken. We Case fans are a close knit ‘family’ with very
good reasons for it to be so. May the J.I. Case Heritage Foundation
continue to expand as did the original company.

(Note: Walter Spreeman travels quite a lot between Alberta and
California, since he has family in both places. If you want to
write to him, mail can be sent c/o 828-D South Rancho, Santa Fe
Road, San Marcos, California 92069.)