Threshing

Threshing

My mother and father were both raised in a farming community about five miles outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Most of the farmers in that area were descendants from immigrants from Germany. The farms were small. Where my father was raised the farm was about 40 acres, which was about the same size as most farms in the area. In order to feed the family and get a little money coming in they had to use up the entire 40 acres. A lot of it in vegetable gardens. But, because they had the horses to feed and grain to be taken to market for extra income a lot of it was planted in hay, oats, and wheat. The farm my mother was raised on about a mile away from my Dad's farm.

Before the harvest there was a lot of planting and the grain had to be cut in the field and bundled and by hand it had to be stacked in shocks. In the shocks it would not rot on the ground and it would dry properly. In the autumn the shocks in the field would be dried and cured enough to be collected and put in the threshing machine. Everybody, including the boys that were old enough, worked in the field to stack the shocks on the trucks and bring them to the threshing machine.

One person in the neighborhood of all these small farms owned the equipment to thresh the grain. It consisted of a steam engine and threshing machine. To move from farm to farm the man with the equipment would drive the steam engine with metal wheels down the roads between farms at about five miles an hour. Behind the steam engine he would tow the threshing machine. When he got on the site he would line up the threshing machine and the steam engine and he had a big belt that was about a foot wide and maybe 15 – 20 feet long. He would attach the belt to the pulleys on both pieces of equipment. In the meantime his schedule was laid out. All the farmers in the neighborhood would gather on the farm that was going to be harvested and do all the work necessary to bring the grain in. They would start early in the morning to take advantage of as much daylight as there was. Hopefully in the one day that farm’s harvesting would be complete.

The women’s job was to prepare the meal and feed the men lunch and supper. The girls either helped with the meals or watched the younger kids. The evening meal included beer and hard cider. After the evening meal was done everyone would sit around and talk and joke and tell about old times. They would catch up on the neighborhood gossip as well. The kids were going to school in the one room schoolhouse. My father went to that school through sixth grade. That was the end of his schooling. What he learned afterwards was out of books from the library and by experience.

After the sun went down the fun would start on the farm at harvest time. There was card playing and singing and lots of drinking. After enough hard cider and beer and passing around the whiskey bottle most of the grown men were feeling pretty good and happy. There were always lots of kids and we would have our own games and fun. When it got dark enough we would play hide and seek. Once it got dark the kids were not allowed in the barn because fire was a danger.

I had so many cousins it was pretty hard to count. In my father’s family there were seven girls and four boys. At that time most of them had children. And farmers believed in lots of children because they needed help in the fields. The family was so large they had an outhouse that was a three-holer. In later years they did put a bathroom in the house. Even after the bathroom was put in we would still use the outhouse when we had company on Sundays.