Remembering Hammtown’s Custom Combines

1950 article brings early custom combining operation roaring back to life.

By Gail Compton
Updated on August 4, 2022
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courtesy Renville County Farmer
The Massey-Harris power take-off Clipper combine was said able “to handle 110 different crops.” Massey was an early leader in development of features that made harvesting a profitable, one-man operation.

Allen Jacobson, Tolley, North Dakota, discovered this article in a 1950 issue of the Renville County Farmer in Mohall, North Dakota, and shared it with us. Written by Gail Compton, then agricultural editor of the Chicago Tribune, the article captures the rhythms and routines of custom combining in the years immediately following World War II.

“Caution next mile, Hammtown combine caravan.”

That sign on the back of a big lumbering truck poking down the highway in the heart of the wheat belt is likely to be your first glimpse of “Hammtown,” the self-contained traveling harvest city with a population of 23.

Then for the next mile along the highway will be strung a strange assortment of grain trucks, huge self-propelled Massey-Harris combines, sleeping and dining trailers, and an assortment of gasoline and water trucks and other trailers.

This unique organization plays a vital role in the harvest of the nation’s vast wheat fields. Working through the gigantic wheat belt which stretches from Texas to Canada through the middle of the nation, Hammtown is typical of America’s ingenuity in getting its crop harvested.

To get the millions of acres of wheat harvested in the grain belt would be impossible without the aid of the traveling combines. Farmer-owned and -operated, these machines start in Texas in May and work up to the Canadian border cutting wheat for farmers at so much per acre or per bushel. Most of the farmers who run the custom combines have farms and crops of their own which they leave to take part in this well-paid job of threshing the country’s wheat.

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