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Plains Folk: Threshing days

By JIM HOY

© Plains Folk

On the first Friday in August I drove to Goessel in western Marion County to take in the annual Threshing Days. This was the 32nd annual harvest festival put on by the Mennonite Heritage Museum there. Unfortunately, I missed the big day, which is Saturday, but I still saw enough to bring back some memories.

I only remember about once that Dad planted any wheat, but through most of the 1950s he always sowed enough oats to provide for our saddle horses and work mules. I don't remember just who all participated, but several different farmers in the area had wheat, barley, or oats to harvest, so our neighborhood did support a threshing ring through the mid '50s. Richard Goering, as I recall, owned the threshing machine (or separator as my mother's father, who came from wheat country down in Sumner County, called it). It was powered by a belt run from a gasoline-burning tractor, maybe a Case.

As I recall, we used to cut our oats about the same time that wheat is now harvested by combine — late June or early July. We cut the oats with a horse-drawn grain binder that had been adapted to pull with a tractor. Dad drove the tractor and I (or sometimes my sister) rode the binder and emptied the carrier when it got from four to six bundles. We were supposed to kick out the bundles in rows as we went around the field, but sometimes my mind would wander and the carrier would get so full that Dad had to stop the tractor and come back to help empty it. And also to remind me (with varying degrees of forcefulness, depending on how much wandering my mind had been doing) to dump bundles when I was supposed to.

As soon as possible after binding, we shocked the bundles, making small teepees out of them. Some people stacked rows of two bundles with another couple of bundles laid on top, but we made cones of ours. The grain (oats or wheat) needed further drying after having been cut, and it would cure in the shock.

When cured, and when it was our turn, Richard Goering would pull in with his threshing machine, set the tractor, and put some sort of stickum on the belts. We'd hitch up two teams of mules (Andy and Mickey, Flossie and Tessie), neighbors would come in with their teams, and we'd start loading bundle wagons to haul to the separator. Some people could stack bundles on wagons pretty well; others sometimes had to restack when part of a load fell off.

Two men would usually throw bundles onto the conveyor, but you had to be careful not to throw on too many or the machine might get clogged. As the grain was threshed from the heads, it went into a grain wagon or the back of a truck, while the straw was blown into a stack. The whole process was dirty and itchy, as I was reminded at Goessel when I was taking some photos and got a neck full of chaff. Which reminded me clearly of why I preferred cow work to farm work back then.

One of the old threshing machines there (an Altman-Taylor with a double conveyor) had an American flag on the top. I thought at first it was pure patriotism, but it could well be to indicate wind direction before the chaff started to come out of the blower.

There also were scores of old tractors, from fairly recent models of John Deere and Allis Chalmers, to some turn of the (last) century steam and gasoline powered behemoths. One called a Big Four and another named a Flour City had back wheels of iron that stood eight feet in diameter.

All in all it was an interesting show, and I hope to be able to go on Saturday next year.

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