Threshing

As I have mentioned before, uncle Carl in the heyday of his threshing activities ran perhaps as many as three threshing rigs at a time but in later years he ran only one, for himself and the adjacent neighbors. For this he used the big old Huber threshing machine and one of his large Hart-Parr tractors for power.

Typically the threshing rig would be set up in the barnyard to either discharge the straw into a barn, or to a place where the farmer wanted a straw stack. This might take considerable maneuvering with the rather clumsy tractor and the ponderous threshing machine. In operation the bundles would be hauled in from the field by the bundle wagons, the bundles tossed into the threshing machine, and the machine would discharge the threshing grain and the straw. The farmers in the threshing run would act as the bundle haulers — one man (usually Will Lines) would be assigned the task of hauling away the grain to the farmer’s grain storage. Uncle Carl used himself and a helper to run the threshing rig.

In later years my brother Vincent ran the tractor and my uncle was on the threshing machine. He would stand on top of the threshing machine surveying the scene to make sure that everything was operating correctly. Earlier he had used an elderly man (doubtless a previous employee) for the separator man while he ran the tractor. I can recall running the tractor once or twice but Vincent had much more experience doing that job than I did.

The farms in the threshing run extended over a two-mile length of road and the threshing would be done starting at one end of the road and working along it farm by farm to the other end. The next season the order would be reversed. The only schedule followed each year would be for uncle Carl’s oats to be threshed last (the only time a different schedule was followed was one year when some of his oats required special attention or consideration for some reason and part of his oats was done at the start of the threshing run).

In the fall of the year a threshers’ meeting would be held at which time the accounts of labor and threshing fees for uncle Carl would be ironed out. I recall one of these meetings being held around the dining room table at the farmhouse.

The elderly man that uncle Carl used as the “separator” man during the first year ot so that we were on the farm (until Vincent became old enough to handle the tractor end of the threshing rig) was Emil Sellestrom. He lived in Gowrie a couple of blocks from my grandmother’s house and was of an age when he worked only sporadically. He may have been employed by uncle Carl in the heyday of his threshing operation. At any rate by the time I knew of him he was well past his prime functionally.

One winter when the wind blew the corn down so that the mechanical picker could not be used, he helped pick corn for my uncle. This was the year that my cousin Leonard helped pick corn also. In hand picking corn the practice is for the picker to take two rows, throwing the picked corn up into a wagon drawn by two horses. Leonard tells of one occasion when he was behind Emil in preceding across the cornfield. He noticed that Emil was pulling further and further ahead of him, which he thought odd as Leonard as a young man could pick corn faster than Emil. It turned out the Emil was taking only a single row, for whatever reason, pride or otherwise. I don’t recall if my cousin stayed with us during the time he picked corn for my uncle, or whether he drove to the farm each day.

After the threshing was finished, the oat stubble was plowed to prepare it for corn planting the following spring. Typically the threshing would be finished early in August and the plowing would be completed by the middle of September. Prior to the plowing manure would be hauled out and spread on the stubble — the manure might be old straw stack bottoms or the year’s accumulation from the barn. Uncle Carl used one of his smaller Hart-Parr tractors for plowing — these could pull a three-bottom plow whereas this was more than the Farmall could handle. I don’t recall ever having done any plowing.

Planting Oats

The oats were planted in late March or early April and were usually planted on land that had grown corn the year before. Typically the oats were seeded by a rotating spreader attached to the back end of a lumber wagon (uncle Carl used a small two-wheel cart that he had adapted). Prior to the seeding the oats used for seed were run through a fanning mill to remove weed seeds, extraneous debris and inferior kernels — the oats as it came out of the previous year’s threshing was used to seed. Following the seeding the land was disced once or twice to cover the seed with soil and also to break up and mash down the cornstalks left over from the previous year. A final operation might then be applied — with a packer or roller that served to further smooth the ground and further mash down an cornstalk debris still sticking up. This would facilitate the later harvesting the oats with the binder.

By late June the oats would be mature and the harvest would begin. Since the field had been seeded with oats right up to the fences, the field would be “opened” up by pulling the binder with a three-horse team. (To provide the third horse my uncle borrowed one of the two horses that Will Lines had; his team were named Maud and Lucy.) The swath cut by the binder on this first turn around the field was directly adjacent the fence — this meant that the horses were walking through the standing grain further in from the fence. By using horses for the opening swath, less grain would be broken down than if the tractor were used to pull the binder.



Re-creation of sketch in Carl’s notebook

After this first swath had been cut, the binder went around the field in the opposite rotation and was pulled by the Farmall tractor. The binder had a carrier on the side on which the bundles collected after they were tied and were periodically dumped by the person riding on the binder (namely, my uncle Carl). The bundles were dropped to form windrows. The workers shocking the pat bundles would erect the shocks along these windrows. As the grain would need to dry further before it could be threshed and stored, it would stand in the field for awhile. Typically this drying period would be a week or so and then the threshing would begin.

I can recall being at my grandmother’s house for a Sunday dinner when my uncle Carl described to me (us) how the oat shocking was done. This was doubtless soon before the first oat harvest in which I was involved. The first step was to set up two bundles on end with the end where the grain kernels were uppermost. These two bundles would sort of lean against each other. Then two bundles would be leaned against these first bundles to support them. Then four more bundles would be added leaning again against the first two bundles. The shock was then capped with a ninth bundle after it had been spread out to provide sort of a roof to keep the rain off.



Re-creation of diagram of oat bundle arrangement

In the seeding operation uncle Carl ran the seeder while I drove the Farmall pulling the disc that covered up the seed. On one occasion I made the turn at the end of the field not quite soon enough and one of the projections on the front of the tractor got caught in the fence. The woven wire was damaged somewhat but I managed to extricate the Farmall and the disc (fortunately the latter did not get into the fence). The damage could be readily seen but it wasn’t enough to damage the effectiveness of the fence. I never reported the event to uncle Carl. I can imagine what his reaction would have been. The event occurred in the big field just north of the building site, along the fence between the Peterson and Woodard farms.

Back before the days of the grain binder, the cut grain was simply discharged out of the side of the reaper onto the grain stubble. The bundles then had to be made manually by taking some stalks of grain, wrapping them around the amount of grain suitable for a bundle and twisting them together. Altogether a very tedious and time-consuming procedure.

Oat Farming

During the years I was in high school and junior college I worked on the farm, either for my uncle Carl, or for neighboring farmers. I don’t recall for sure but I think I did some work the summer after we moved to the farm — I was between 7th and 8th grades in school. I probably helped to “shock” oats, or it may have been that I drove the tractor which pulled the binder (the machine that cut the oats and tied them into bundles). The bundles were assembled in the field into a shock, each shock containing 8 bundles plus an additional cap bundle to help shed the rain. During the threshing operation these oat bundle shocks were loaded onto hay racks, hauled to the site in the barnyard where the threshing was done and tossed into the threshing machine. This was one of the jobs that my father did for uncle Carl and I believe I drove the bundle wagon for him.

The two old horses that still remained on the farm were used to pull the bundle wagon. One of these was old Birdie — she died one winter day from old age. She fell down in the barnyard and couldn’t get up again. I believe uncle Carl had the vet come out and dispatch her. The other horse was Barney, a younger horse and a son for Birdie. He was a better animal — his fate was to contract encephalitis and one night during the threshing season he broke out of the barnyard, ran off and died in a neighbor’s cornfield. I had been driving Barney and Birdie when I was hauling bundles myself at a later date.

I had noticed the day before that Barney had been acting strangely. That was the time I had to drive the fully loaded bundle over a sloping place near the southeast corner of the barn and the wagon fell over. The accident probably could have been avoided had not Barney stopped in a strange manner at precisely the wrong moment relative to the equilibrium of the bundle wagon — had he kept on moving the wagon might have stayed upright. That evening before he broke out Barney ran ceaselessly back and forth in the barnyard, doubtless showing the effect of his affliction.

Two principal crops were grown on the farm when we moved onto it — oats and corn. The “fanning” of the seed oats was typically the first fieldwork of the season in which I participated. I can recall the fanning mill being set up in the runway of the old granary and helping uncle Carl with the fanning operation. The oats from the previous year’s harvest were stored either in two overhead bins in the corn crib or in a bin on the east side of the granary. The oats from the latter bin were the part of the crop from the previous year used to prepare the seed oats. I can still sense the still cool weather of the spring at the time and the sense of the beginning of the season’s work.

After oats declined as a crop (replaced by soybeans), the soybeans were stored, in part, in the granary where the oats had been. The granary was the oldest building on the farm and in not-too-good condition. On one occasion, after I had left the farm either for school at the University of Iowa or to go to work for Shell, the granary sprang a leak and the soybeans leaked out into the barnyard where the cows were. They ate too much and several of them died

The west side of the granary when we were on the farm was used for storage of miscellaneous equipment — it may at one time have been used also for grain storage. There was a loft and it was there that I found an old discarded sewing machine of my grandmother’s. The wooden part of the machine was black walnut and I used the wood to make a sewing box for her from it. After my grandmother died I think my mother acquired it and used it for awhile but eventually it came back to me. I refinished it, fixed the hinges and not it sits on top of my dresser holding various relics.



This is the box. [It is now in my possession — LRS.] Inside, there is the following note: This box was made when I was a freshman in high school in manual arts class. It was constructed of wood from an old sewing machine (vintage earlier than 1915) that had belonged to my maternal grandmother and was given to her as a sewing box. Later it was used similarly by my mother and I acquired it on her death. I refinished it at that time along with some minor repairs.