The
industry of Sutton is farming, always has been and will be for a long time to
come.
It
all started when the fellow we consider our founder, Luther French choose a
piece of bottom land straddling School Creek for a homestead and to grow a
little wheat.
Luther
French grew that first wheat using methods, tools and equipment that would have
been recognized by earlier farmers going back many generations, decades or even
hundreds of years. A serf from the twelfth century could have walked up and
pitched in without needing a bit of training.
During
142 years of farming around Sutton essentially all of the technological
advances in crop farming has been reflected on these farms. Improvements in metallurgy, mechanization and
methods altered the way the ground was worked, which crops were grown and how. Progress
has been rapid and steady.
Those
of us who grew up on farms in the 1950’s witnessed many significant changes and
saw the tail end of several wide spread and common practices. I’m thinking of
threshing, corn shelling and hay stacking.
Those
three jobs had been around a while and by the ‘50’s had advanced from horse
power to engine power but were still labor intensive. A farmer could not do these
things by himself. He needed a crew. To borrow a contemporary phrase, “It took
a village.”
Let’s
start with threshing.
Before
combines, wheat (or oats) was cut and collected into bundles by the “binder” ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_teubgTrdI&feature=fvwrel ). The next
pass was shocking, collecting several, seven as I recall, bundles, standing
them on end leaning together in a tepee-like “shock.”
Soon the grain was ready for threshing.
There are still a few threshing machines sitting along our roadsides. Check out
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DZfESGwXqw
) to see
how they worked.
Threshing,
shelling and stacking required a crew. How did the farmer find a crew? By
negotiation. Each farmer built his crew by agreeing to help a neighbor or
relative when he threshed, shelled or stacked. These one-on-one agreements
produced to group to get the job done.
 |
| Hornbacher’s threshing machine in operation in 1912 during the horse and mule days. |
Generally,
a farmer’s crew was a unique set of his neighbors. When he reciprocated and helped
a neighbor on his crew, it was with a different set of men from that fellow’s
neighbors. So a broad network, a network of workers but a real social network
developed that extended out a long ways.
The
threshing crew had well-defined divisions of responsibilities. There were guys
who collected the bundles and brought them to the threshing machine from the
field in wagons. There men pitched bundles onto the canvas conveyor, heads first,
of course. There was a name for that conveyor – feeder or something. Don’t
remember.
The
thresher separated the wheat from the straw. Somebody had trucks and trailers
to collect the wheat and move it off to town or scoop into a bin. Straw was
blown off onto a pile, preferably downwind and out of the way.
Each
of these operations had some jobs that were assigned to boys. The straw pile was
one of those responsibilities. One of my jobs was to direct the straw blower.
Another was to “top off” the wheat in the trailer as it got full.
Threshing
had been a big thing for decades and feeding threshers was one of the real
tests of a farm wife. Unless she had a houseful of daughters, a parallel work
crew developed from among the wives in the neighborhood. Threshing crews could
be large; appetites always were. “There’s enough here for threshers!” described
any table with lots of food.
Harvesting
corn was different then from now. The corn picker was a great improvement over
picking by hand but handling the crop remained the same. Corn was stored in the
corn crib that was a part of every farmstead. The crib was filled in the fall
and the corn dried over winter and through summer. Some of us remember what
“sealed corn” was but that’s a different discussion.
The
corn sheller in the ‘50’s was generally a truck mounted machine, perhaps a John
Deere machine and was someone’s seasonal business – Hornbacher and Trautman in
Sutton, Schrock in Edgar, my grandfather, Fred Johnson in an earlier time.
When
a farmer was ready to shell, he’d schedule the corn sheller and contact his
crew – neighbors, relatives, etc. These corn shelling days, like threshing and
stacking hay, took priority. It would seem like a challenge to coordinate all
those schedules, but a farmer would drop everything to go work at his neighbors
because he would soon need the same consideration from each of them.
 |
Rhiny
Hornbacher’s horse drawn corn sheller rig and crew in 1915.
|
The
corn shelling crew had guys raking and scooping corn out of the crib into the
“drag” on the machine and others to handle the grain, the cob pile and the pile
of shucks. One of my jobs was catching the cobs in trailers and scooping them
into the cob house trying to keep ahead of the shellers. Check out (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClceVnYvClg
) and
other neat videos of corn shellers.
Hay
stacking was the third crew-based task from the ‘50’s. Before general access to
balers alfalfa, and prairie hay (are there any prairie hay fields still around,
anywhere?) was stored in stacks of loose hay, sometimes huge stacks. Hay
stacking changed summer windrows of hay to neat stacks of winter feed.
This
crew had a couple of fellows with wide hay forks mounted on the front of
tractors (earlier horse drawn.). These forks were 10 or 12 feet across. This
was probably the fastest any farmer drove his tractor in a field. The hay forks
brought the hay up close to the stack where a hay stacker lifted hay onto the
stack. There were “overshot stackers” though I don’t remember them. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ7PvQ1Fd60
)
My
father had a Jayhawk Stacker, a large two-wheel contraption that hooked on the
front of his Allis-Chalmers. It had a hay fork that lifted hay to the top of
the stack via a cable wrapped around the axle of the machine. The fork lifted
as the machine moved forward. The trick was to judge how far back from the
stack to engage the lift to hit the right height as you got to the stack.
A
small group of guys stood on the stack and packed the hay to make it
water-tight, or mostly so, an art form I never caught onto. My job was to rake
up the loose hay out in the field that had fallen off the hay forks.
These
three jobs were long-running shows in our part of the country over decades into
the ‘50’s when progress made them obsolete, all within just a few years.
Progress empowered the single farmer to do more and more by himself negating
the need to develop close relationships with his neighbors on such a scale. Progress
and efficiency are always good things. Aren’t they?
This
article first appeared in the August, 2012 issue of Sutton Life Magazine. For
further information about this magazine please visit http://www.suttonlifemagazine.com/
or call 402-984-4203.
