Farmers have come a long way from the time of the flail and the threshing floor, but the goal has never changed: Separate the oats grain from its stalk. Threshing day on Labor Day, September 5, 2022, brought back a lot of memories from my youth in the 1940s and ’50s on the 238-acre Scheckel farm outside of Seneca, in the heart of Crawford County, Wisconsin.
Fortunately, there is a place to relive those youthful days. It’s on the Monsignor Michael Gorman farm off Highway 171 between Boaz and Rolling Ground, on the western side of Richland County. The 250-acre farm has been in the Gorman family since 1857, handed down through generations of Irish immigrants. It’s located in the Driftless Area, among God’s most beautiful creations.
A farmer at heart
Monsignor Michael Gorman has been pastor of St. Charles Borromeo’s Church in Chippewa Falls and St. Peter the Apostle Church in Tilden since 2016. Born in Richland Center and raised on the family farm, Monsignor Gorman attended Akan Central Grade School, high school at Richland Center, then St. Francis de Sales College Seminary in Milwaukee and St. Paul Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was ordained a Catholic priest in May 1980. He began his priestly duties as associate pastor at St. John the Baptist in Marshfield, then Blessed Sacrament in La Crosse. He studied Canon Law in Rome from 1984-1986.
Monsignor Gorman has held several pivotal posts in the Diocese of La Crosse: Bishop’s secretary, master of ceremonies, director of Catholic Cemeteries, chancellor, moderator of the Curia, director of the Office of Sacred Worship, parochial administrator of St. Leo Parish in West Salem and St. Mary Parish in Bangor, pastor of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Parish in Viroqua, Latin instructor at Aquinas High School, rector of St. Joseph the Workman Cathedral in La Crosse, moderator of the Curia a second time, and vicar general.
He is the sixth priest from St. Philip’s parish at Rolling Ground. Eight religious sisters also came out of the St. Philip’s parish. Monsignor Gorman was named prelate of honor by Pope Benedict XVI on October 31, 2012. Yet, with all those duties and responsibilities, Monsignor Gorman remains a farmer at heart.
The satisfaction of standing shocks
There can be no threshing day unless there are oats shocks to thresh. To that end, a bunch of us met on August 10 at the O’Kane farm near St. Philip Church at Rolling Ground to cut and shock 2 acres of oats raised by parishioner Mark Burbach. Rolling Ground puts us in Crawford County, a few miles south of Soldiers Grove.
Monsignor Gorman’s 1936 McCormick-Deering grain binder is pulled by a 1941 Farmall H tractor. It’s truly amazing how those mid-20th century machines have held up. Some will soon be 100 years old. I was always intrigued by the knotter on those grain binders. As a kid, I tried to figure out the knotter, but it operated much too quickly. Frankly, it’s still a mystery to me.
We can thank Cyrus McCormick for inventing the reaper and John Appleby for developing the knotter. That combo increased grain production by a factor of 30. That big bull wheel on the binder runs the whole machine: the sickle, the reel, the three canvases, the binding mechanism, the knotter and the bundle discharge. It didn’t take long for us six guys to get the shocking done. It’s a satisfying sight, indeed, to view a field of standing oats shocks.
Sumptuous meal marks threshing day
There’s something else you need to have on threshing day: a threshing dinner. In 2022, it was held at St. Philip Church located about 1 mile east of Rolling Ground off Highway 171. It’s a beautiful edifice, built in 1909.
Monsignor Gorman’s sister, Mary, and her friends prepare and serve a sumptuous potluck dinner at noon for 50-60 people. The desserts are to die for! The threshing dinner and threshing day has been an annual event for nearly 50 years.
I hark back to my early childhood days on the farm when the threshing ring came around to the Scheckel farm. I do believe those farm wives tried to outdo each other in the lavish meals provided for hungry threshers.
Threshing in the valley
Once the threshers’ dinner is concluded, the entourage motors east off the ridge and into the valley below, some 6 miles to the Gorman farmstead. The good Monsignor had the 1948 McCormick-Deering 28-inch-cylinder thresher leveled and belted up to a 1952 Allis Chalmers WD tractor, with all zerks greased. A half dozen men gather around the machinery while spectators view the scene on a higher shaded grassy knoll.
The first wagon load of bundles is pulled into place. Monsignor opens the throttle of the WD with puffs of black smoke wafting skyward. The pulley is engaged and the big beast of a McCormick-Deering thresher arises from the dead, coming to life as the first bundles are tossed onto the feeder chute, the big claw teeth rhythmically gulping for oats bundles.
Soon, a constant yellow plume of straw and chaff from the blower pipe is set against the azure blue Wisconsin sky. Bundle after bundle, the behemoth thresher does its job, all eight belts and five chains working together to remove the oats grain from its stalk.
Monsignor climbs up the steps on the side of the thresher. Threshed oats go up an elevator on the side of the big machine and are dumped in a receiver bucket or weigher. The bucket is counterbalanced by a weight. When full, the bucket opens and dumps the grain into an auger that takes it to a waiting dump box wagon.
At the same time, the dumping bucket operates a geared counter that keeps track of the number of bushels threshed. Two dumping trips of the bucket is one bushel of oats. The counter has three “windows” and operates like the counters used to monitor residential electricity use. Yes, everything is working fine, and Monsignor Gorman retraces his steps to alight on the ground.
He opens the large, galvanized hinged door by the blower fan and inspects a handful of the debris, checking for any kernels that might be escaping up the blower pipe instead of going up the elevator, counted and loaded into the grain bin by an auger.
Buttoning it up for another year
Threshing complete, the machine must be “put to bed.” The big straw pipe is telescoped to its shortest length. A large gear is turned so the straw pipe is atop and parallel with the thresher, then gently lowered by gearing it to its cradle. The long drive belt reaching from tractor to thresher is removed from the tractor’s pulley and laid out on the ground. A crank on the thresher rolls up the belt and it is secured on the side of the thresher.
The grain auger is removed from the grain bin, swung around and secured by a clamp. The hinged front feeder gate is unfastened and tucked under. The tractor can now back up to the thresher, which is pinned to the tractor for transport to the machine shed where it will be stored until next year.
These threshing machines are a marvel of engineering, perfected over decades of trial and error. The thresher was the largest piece of machinery on the farm and too expensive for most farmers, hence the threshing ring, which traveled from farm to farm.
Baling the straw
The threshing machine goes into the machine shed and the New Holland baler, powered by an International 544 tractor, comes out. The crew forks the straw pile into windrows and Monsignor, tractor and baler make circles.
The power take-off is the primary method of transferring power from a tractor to any pulled machine or attached implement. The concept is nearly 100 years old. When PTOs became standard on farm machines in the 1940s and 1950s, the number of accidents increased because loose clothing was sometimes pulled onto the shaft, resulting in bone fractures and loss of limbs, and sometimes ensuring a closed casket.
The Gorman 268 New Holland Hayliner baler is another example of ingenious farm machinery design. These balers were made between 1964 and 1968. It is a marvel to watch the U-joints, the massive flywheel, the big plunger, the knotters and the belt thrower. The straw bale is squeezed between two wide belts that toss the bale into the trailing wagon. The mechanism allows the farmer to bale hay alone, without a worker on the wagon to stack the bales.
With oats in the gravity wagon and bales on a flatbed wagon, the baler is returned to the machine shed. Both wagons are hooked to a pickup truck and oats and straw are returned to the farm from whence they came. Labor Day threshing is done for another year. We give thanks to St. Isadore, the patron saint of farmers. A task which was hard work when we were growing up has now become a nostalgic pleasure.
Larry Scheckel grew up on a family farm in the hill country of southwestern Wisconsin. He and his wife, Ann, are retired teachers living in Tomah, Wisconsin. Contact him at 1113 Parkview Dr., Tomah, WI 54660; email: Lscheckel@charter.net; online at Larry Scheckel.
Originally published as “Old Iron at Work” in the May 2023 issue of Farm Collector magazine