Staff writer
Wheat harvest is a busy time on the farm. It was even more so in the days when the wheat was processed with a threshing machine. Following are personal accounts found in the book, “Mennonite Foods and Folkways from South Russia, Vol. II,” by Norma Jost Voth. They were shared by her uncle, Dan G. Jost, Bertha Fast Harder, and Minnie Jost Krause, who recounted harvest time in Kansas during the first quarter of the 20th century.
Harvest began with the cutting of the grain using a binder. The grain was cut and tied with twine into bundles. Next came the hard work of picking up the bundles from the ground and standing them up one against the other to make a shock. Grain heads always stood upright in the shock to help prevent possible rain damage before harvest. It took 12-15 bundles to make a shock.
Sometimes, 15-20 men were needed to bring in the harvest. Threshing usually was done by a group of farmers who formed a crew that traveled from farm to farm. Shocks were loaded into horse-drawn hay wagons and hauled to the threshing site.
A big, steam tractor was used to pull the threshing machine from one farm to another and then to run it. It was a huge metal monster, belching and puffing down the road at the incredible speed of two-and-a-half miles an hour. It was followed by grain wagons or trucks and then bundle wagons pulled by horses. The threshing machine was powered using a long, wide rubber belt running from a flywheel on the tractor to the machine.
Each crew had an engineer who managed the whole operation. He usually rose at 4 a.m. to stoke the tractor’s boiler and get the steam to the point where it would be the right pressure for threshing. He sometimes put in as many as 15 or 16 hours of work a day because the day went from sunrise to sunset.
Next to the engineer was the “water monkey.” He handled the water for the boiler while the fireman tended the boilers which produced the steam. It took about six tanks of water a day. The water came from a creek dam, or big tank.
The separator man was a master mechanic. His job was looking out for trouble and keeping the machine running. With an oil can in one hand, he was constantly dabbing oil on the moving parts of the big machine.
Sometimes wheat bundles were picked up in the field and placed in a neat stack about 25 feet high. Later, when farm work eased in the fall, the threshing machine was pulled up beside this stack, and the bundles were fed into the machine.
One fellow pitched bundles into the machine while another fed him bundles from the far side of the stack.
The grain was separated, with the chaff and straw blowing out from a large pipe and forming a huge straw stack in back of the machine. The threshed grain was channeled into a grain wagon. Sometimes younger members of the family stood in the wagon and distributed the wheat into the corners of the wagon.
It was hauled away to be shoveled into granaries.
The engineer oversaw the whole operation using blasts of the whistle. Several short blasts meant a grain wagon was needed. Sometimes the water monkey had to go quite a distance for water. When the engineer whistled four long whistles, he stopped drawing water immediately and drove back as fast as he could in order to supply the steamer with water. Three long blasts meant it was time for dinner, and shorter blasts signaled the crew to stop for lunch at mid-morning and mid-afternoon.
Meal-time was a busy time for the women. There were no electric or gas stoves, no electric mixers, refrigerators, freezers, or other conveniences. All food was prepared by hand and from scratch.
Often neighbors would join together to prepare the food. The work of peeling potatoes and baking bread, cakes, and pies began early in the morning. Butter had to be churned and cream hauled from the well or cave where it cooled. Apples and peaches were picked from the orchard; tomatoes and beans came from the garden.
Chickens would be butchered. Some families even butchered a hog the day before. A home-cured ham might be fetched from the smokehouse and scrubbed and trimmed so it could be baked or boiled the following day.
There were many details to organize so meals could be served on time. Sjummer days were long, and if the weather was good, threshing continued into the evening, making five meals to prepare and serve during the day.
The threshers quit around 7 or 7:30 p.m. Horses were unharnessed and fed and other chores were done. After this, supper was served. Then farmers who lived nearby went home for the night while others slept in the barn.
A good day of threshing might bring around 1,500 bushels of grain. The grain remained in the farmer’s granary and was sold later when the price was right. A good crop yielded 15-20 bushels per acre.
To see a threshing crew in action, visit the Threshing Days celebration this Saturday in Goessel.
(Source: Mennonite Foods and Folkways from South Russia, Vol. II, by Norma Jost Voth, 1991, published by Good Books, Intercourse, Penn.)