The love of a woman snared John Gallahue into a
lifelong fascination with steam traction engines. “My wife Tara and
I started dating in about 1979, and her father, Lloyd (Bones) Dehm
Sr., was running the 1917 Reeves 16 HP steam traction engine at the
Mt. Pleasant (Iowa) Midwest Old Threshers Reunion, and had been
since the early 1960s. He ran it over the years and helped maintain
it.
“Tara has been going to Mt. Pleasant about every year since she
was alive. So, because we were dating, in about 1980 I went to Mt.
Pleasant with her for a day. Of course, then I was more interested
in my father-in-law’s daughter than in steam,” the 56-year-old
laughs.
But that soon changed. “I started helping him and got attached
to the idea of steam and the Reeves. So when I had the opportunity
to buy it, I jumped at the chance and ended up with it.”
The Reeves didn’t require a lot of work to keep it going. “It
had been re-flued not long before I got it and new babbitt bearings
had been poured for the valve linkage rods. Other than that, it
just needed cleaning up. I want to get it painted before I take it
back to Mt. Pleasant in September,” John says.
John is pretty sure that other than when it was manufactured by
the Emerson-Brantingham Co. of Rockford, Ill., the 1917 Reeves 16
HP steam traction engine, serial no. 8017, has not been out of the
state of Iowa. “So it’s getting kind of homesick sitting here at my
place,” he says. There weren’t many steam traction engines in the
Piper City, Ill., area where he grew up and now lives, mostly
because the area was swamp land until drainage ditches were
dug.
“Steam engines couldn’t cross the bridges built over the
drainage ditches because they were too heavy and would break
through. They did have steam engines around here, of course, but it
seems like most people went right from horses to the gas tractors,”
John says. Most of the remaining steam engines were cut up for
scrap during World War II.
But there are quite a few of the Reeves 16 HP engines around.
“It’s not a rare engine, but it’s special to me,” John says. He
says his father-in-law is a dedicated steam man and has only missed
one Mt. Pleasant show, the first one in 1960. “We tease him about
that,” John says. “We say everybody was trying to keep it a secret
so he wouldn’t show up. But teasing aside, he’s the one who got me
started in steam. One thing led to another and now I also have a
1915 Port Huron 19 HP Longfellow steam traction engine.”
Just the Facts, Please
The 16 HP Reeves was made to burn wood or coal, but coal holds
the fire longer. “But with what we do with it, putting it on a
sawmill or a veneer mill at Iowa quite often, wood makes enough
steam for something like that.”
The 1917 Reeves doesn’t have its factory jacket over the boiler
any longer, which is a thin sheet of steel wrapped around the
boiler that helped keep the heat in.
“The jackets usually had wood insulation, and most were taken
off the steam engines several years ago so the boiler inspectors
could examine the boilers,” John says. My father-in-law remembers
the jacket for the Reeves. It had cherry wood insulation between
the boiler and the jacket, and brass bands. He claimed it even had
a radius on the wood that fit the shape of the boiler. It would
have been quite a talent to put that insulation and jacketing on.
It was taken off at Mt. Pleasant for the inspectors. The next year
when he went over to put it back on, it was gone.” John is also
familiar with the jackets, as his Port Huron steam engine still has
one.
The major item that is different on a Reeves from other steam
engines is the drive system, John says. “It does not have a clutch,
but direct drive so there is no slippage at all.” That made these
Reeves engines great for plowing, and popular in plowing country.
“A pin would lock the drive in so you wouldn’t have anything
slipping if you were going to plow. When you were using it on the
belt, like threshing, you’d take the pin out so it could run the
threshing machine or sawmill, or whatever for belt work.”
It’s hard to figure out why more steam traction engines didn’t
use this system, but it might have had to do with convenience.
“Usually there’s a lever right by the engineer to disengage the
flywheel to use it on belt work,” John says, “and to take the pin
out can be done from the operator’s platform on the left side of my
Reeves, but it’s a lot easier if you get off and disengage the
pin.”
John says he found out firsthand how hot it could be when
working around steam traction engines at Mt. Pleasant when the air
temperature was over 100 degrees in the shade. “It was really hot.
But when you got away from the steam engine, it seemed kind of
cool.” He remembers hearing that from old steam engineers, too.
And people are always surprised how silent steam engines are,
John says. “They say, ‘It doesn’t make much noise for how big it
is.’ People stop at my shop to see it and without any of the
background noise from Mt. Pleasant, they can’t believe how quiet
the Reeves is and how smoothly it runs for how big it is.”
This steam is quite a hobby, John says. “Basically steam is how
the country was made, steam locomotives and steam traction engines
broke the prairie, so it’s kind of neat to keep that history and
tradition going.”
Contact Bill Vossler at Box 372, 400 Caroline Lane,
Rockville, MN 56369; e-mail: bvossler@juno.com
