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.