Working Together

out of doors, the young ladies visited, the young fry ran wild
around the farm yard and some of the young people paired off. And
then it was all over, but the comradeship of a big job well done
would linger on in our memory. Each of us had the good feeling of
having been needed by his fellow man, and of being respected as a
good worker and a good sport. I don’t know of a better way to
weld together a group of people than to have them own a steam
threshing rig year after year. You didn’t have to wonder
whether you could depend upon your friends, you had been partners
on the threshing crew, how better could you tell a friend than
that?’

Farming has undergone continuous change throughout the years.
The rude pioneer farms that were wrested from the wilderness by our
ancestors have been replaced by super-farms of hundreds of acres
with machinery to match. However, not every change has been an
improvement. Many of us remember, with fond nostalgia, the fine
quality of the social life in the years before the Second War, when
labor was traded between neighbors as a way of life; the social
interaction that resulted was welcome and valuable.

Threshing, silo filling, hay baling, and firewood sawing were
jobs that required a crew, and the long hours of hard, often cold,
dusty work were rewarded not so much by the obligation of repayment
in kind, but by the opportunity to meet friends and neighbors in a
pleasant interruption of an otherwise solitary, humdrum life. We
looked forward to those excuses to get together with our neighbors
and enjoyed, in spite of the discomforts, those long work days. A
snake or a nest of field mice could, by some fertile, active mind,
be transformed into the basis for a new practical joke that was
long remembered and often recounted.

A threshing crew in Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, nearly one
hundred years ago on the farm of the John Kelso family. Close
attention to the picture shows it to be of an old wooden separator
with a straw carrier rather than a blower, and being powered by a
portable steam engine of rather a small size. There are at least
seventeen men gathered around the rig, and from the few grain sacks
seen in the picture, threshing probably did not go along as rapidly
as was the case about twenty years later, so the number of men
employed probably did not result in much work being done, according
to later working methods. Still, it was a threshing scene to
remember, and one to really gladden the hearts of those of us who
can dimly remember threshing rigs of nearly this same great
age.

There is a difference between a group of men sweating together
in a hay mow and their modern counter-parts congregated at a bar or
a bowling alley. In the first case, we were united against a common
enemy, the Depression, and our work together was a way of
conserving a slender income by bartering labor instead of dollars.
This attitude put a finer point on the reason for being together,
and made the socializing especially worthwhile as a means to an
end. Those of us who were fortunate enough to have experienced
those times recall them with fondness.