Threshing Tales

depend on whether International Harvester built all their machines
in Hamilton, Ontario. I have seen John Deere Threshers being built
by George White & Son’s Co. Ltd., London, Ontario.

The machines built for Ontario had extra equipment necessary for
barn threshing. The machines used for custom threshing that I had
seen, had chaff blowers. They were located behind the shoe and in
front of the straw blower. They collected the chaff that came off
of the shoe and the farmer could blow it into a separate boarded up
area off of the barn floor. This was a sort of a nuisance item. I
only saw a chaff blower used twice. If you figured the value of the
total digestable nutrients of the chaff and balanced this against
the discomfort and extra dust created by the chaff blower, I doubt
if it was worth using it.

The straw blower pipe had a hinge built into each side of it
located before the telescopic extension. It was necessary to pull a
hinge pin and break the blower pipe in order to extend it out the
back door into the barnyard to build a stack. The same process had
to be repeated if you want to blower back inside the barn to fill a
mow with straw.

Some machines had spiral knife, lawn mower type straw cutters.
More straw could be stored in a barn using these. Cut straw also
made better bedding. They added about a ton of extra weight to the
back of the machine and could use up to 15 horsepower to drive
them.

These were replaced by straw shredders. There were quite a few
makes of these, the most noteworthy being the one made by
Lobsiinger Brothers of Miildmay. It consisted of a set of cast iron
bruisers bolted to outer edge of the blower fan. These passed
between serrated edged knives located in the perisphery of the
blower housing. There were six rows of knives and one could use as
many or as few knives as one desired as they were easily removed or
placed in cutting position from outside the machine. The amount of
weight added to the machine and also the horsepower requirements
were insignificant.

The advantage of storing the sheaves and threshing them in the
barn meant one’s crop was exposed to the weather for a shorter
period of time than it would be by using any other method. The
disadvantage was that one had to take the discomfort of working in
the dust at a barn threshing. It was good crop insurance as I have
seen weather conditions here where fall wheat would sprout in the
stooik. The farmers exchanged help for this job. If you required
12-14 men, it meant you would spend 15-20 days going to
threshings.

The worst possible conditions occurred usually in a year of
exceptionally good weather. This happened if the farmer completed
his cutting and stooking in short order, and started storing the
sheaves in the barn before the natural sap had dried out of the
straw. In the drying out process that took place in the barn, the
sheaves moulded. Ten minutes after starting to thresh, the barn
would be filled with a grey mouldy dust so thick you could not
recognize a man standing ten feet from you. This mouldy dust was
every bit as potent as penicillin. It made many a strong man sick
about getting the last possible forkful of straw stuffed into the
mow you would think the straw was more valuable than the grain.
Some of them would not have been satisfied unless you tramped and
staffed every corner until you lifted the rafters off of the
plate.

A friend of mine told of tramping the straw when they were
working after 6 p.m. in an effort to finish. About two loads of
sheaves remained in the bottom of the sheaf mow. He was getting
closer to the peak of the barn and the space getting rapidly
smaller as the blower was gaining on him. They were blowing the
straw in on the grainary side of the barn and the situation was
getting desperate. About five minutes later the belt slipped off of
the grain elevator, it being plugged from end to end. By the time
they got it cleaned out and running again, he had time to make
sufficient room for the straw.

The thresherman could not understand how wet grain got into the
grain pipe and plugged it.

One of the better threshermen in our area was the late Mr.
Albert Seebach of Sebringville who used a George White Steam Engine
and George White No. 5, 32-46 steel thresher. He was a man who
could finish threshing out one barn at 12 o’clock noon, have
his dinner, move a mile down the road, be moved in the next barn,
set up, and threshing by one o’clock.

I heard the story that he was threshing at a barn and conditions
were quite dusty. This was about the time they had started to put a
water pump on a separator to pump a spray of water into the blower
to settle the dust. They decided they could accomplish the same
thing by running a hose from the steam engine up into the barn and
into the blower. This seemed to settle the dust, but the men
thought it could do better so they urged him to open the tap a
little more. As the day went on they were putting on a considerable
amount of moisture. One cold day the following January, he called
on the farmer to collect the money he owed him for threshing. He
didn’t find him in the stable with the livestock so he went up
into the barn loft. Here he found him cutting out a days supply of
bedding out of the straw mow with the axe. He left in a hurry as
the farmer threw the axe at him.

The farmer’s wife, and whoever she chose to help her,
provided the meals. This is where the really fine work requiring
artistry and skill took place. In the area I am located in, the
cooks could not only prepare the staples such as meat, potatoes,
vegetables, better than is usually the case, each of them had their
own gourmet speciality such as chili sauce, pickles, horse radish,
salads, relishes, preserved fruit, scones, muffins and biscuits. It
is impossible to describe with words, the quality of the food on
the table, As an indication of the times that existed during the
1920-1930’s, I remember the lady of the house where we were
having supper making the remark that if she had a nickel for every
cow she had milked she would be well off. Considering the quality
of the food on the table, the fact of her milking cows was a waste
of talent comparable to hiring a medical doctor to mow your
lawn.

I think the most of us took this for granted at the time. When I
left the farm and took a job necessitating living in hotels and
eating in restaurants, I then realized how well we lived during the
1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.