Each year the community of IRISH RIDGE of Wisconsin, like every other farming area, began the grain harvest. This is not the wheat fields of the West nor the plains of Canada, but the countryside of the midwest. No huge combines, just steam engines, horses and wagons, and the men and women who lived on the land. My intent is to try to bring an understanding or explanation of sorts to those too young to remember... and renewed memories to those who are lucky enough to remember when life revolved around school board politics, family, neighbors, the weather, and simpler needs that were demanding in a way much different than the latest breaking news stories of the present. I would like to share these scribblings my father wrote in the 1940's about his boyhood memories and dreams, they are historically accurate and the people are real. No judgement intended, just a love of the way it was in the early 1900's.
Thrashing on Irish Ridge
Written by Neil D. Greene
A major project in South West Wisconsin farming in the early 1900's was threshing or, as it was then called thrashing. The season could last from the first of August until late October, all depending on the abundance of the crop or the amount of rainy weather, or whether the farmer threshed from shocks in the field which was earlier or from stacks which was later.
The thrashing ring was all-important to assure an adequate labor supply. This ring was determined by several factors such as the blood relationship, topography, proximity, and state of social cohesiveness of neighbors. Neighborhoods were often determined by the thrashing ring which to all intent and purpose remained quite stable through out the years. If by chance a neighbor was out of sorts during another part of the year, he usually "came to time" before the threshing season.
Since Irish Ridge was a bit extended; Irish Ridge was divided into the upper half and the lower half. Irish Ridge threshing ring included the Mitchels, Browns, Eyers, The Greenes, which included William, Henry, George, Burl, and Lintner; then there were Joe Yanna, George Desmond, Joe Tierney, Bill Kincannon, and Verlyn Hardy.
Getting ready for threshers was all-important. Since the thrashing machine used steam for power, it was essential to have a plentiful supply of wood and good supply of water. As for the housewife, she must have worked for days preparing the food for the threshers; and tubs, wash basins, towels, and pails of water for the thrashers to wash up. It was understood that neighbor women came in on thrashing day to help serve and wash dishes, but it was up to the housewife to outdo other neighbor women by preplanning the amount and quality of the dinner, and supper and breakfast for engineer, water boy, and threshermen who had to stay over if that particular farmer's grain crops were more than a days job. If one were facetious, we could say that it was generally arranged to finish a job at such a time as to guarantee staying over at one of the farms where the cooking and rooming offered the best accommodations.
Mom of those days was either too proud of her table settings or else too naive to recognize the work she made for herself. Threshers usually didn't wash too good, collected considerable rust and dust from threshing, and even though a tub or basin were provided for cleaning up, the men usually left more dirt on Mom's clean towels and best table cloth than they did in the wash water.
Manners and etiquette played minor rolls. It didn't occur to the thresher that he could have carried his dirty plate out to the kitchen as long as he was going that way; it didn't occur that he could have said, "Gee, thanks for a swell meal and so forth; that the chicken or apple pie, or the buttered beets or the frosted chocolate cake was especially good." So, Mom took it for granted that next year she would use her best linen table cloth and silverware, and have plenty of water and tubs, and more white towels for the "thrashers."
Lest you consider this diatribe on cooking for threshers as unimportant, let me assure you that if you were to ask a thresher if meals were important, the answer would be, "you're damned right."
The threshing crew in addition to the engineer, the separator man, and the water wagon man, consisted of several neighbors who had good bundle wagons and could build a good load of bundles; that is, with a butt end of the bundle to the outside and the tops pointing inward so that when he unloaded it with his three-tined fork, bundle by bundle into the thresher feeder, he could do it with greater facility in order to keep a steady supply of grain in the feeder. Too many bundles at one time would clog the separator; too few would be a total waste of thresher time. If a new neighbor moved into the ring, he soon learned whether he would be called on
again for hauling bundles. This was not an undesirable job but there were handicaps; one, if his load of bundles were not properly balanced, he could tip over on some of the "slopier" hillsides, this was both dangerous, time consuming and shameful; two, the bundle wagon man's team of horses might be "scairt" by some rattlesnake, or bumble bees, or a screechy toot of the
threshing engine, and they'd have a "run-a-way"; this was exciting but a bit dangerous, expensive, and embarrassing; three, unless you had experience in determining the exact hour to get to the first table at dinner or supper, the slower or less experienced ones usually ended up eating last, because they had to finish their load in the field, negotiate a rapid but safe transport of their load of bundles to the thresher, and then he had to unload, unhitch, water, and feed his team before he could expect to eat. Some of the less humane bundle men, simply tied up the horses to a fence post and went to eat. This approach was frowned upon!
The pitchers, the men on foot in the grain field who pitched the bundles from the shock onto the bundle wagon, had the best of it, no horses to care for, exposure to fresh air, and time off between wagons. The only difficulty was that on occasion they might be in a field half a mile
from the house when dinner and supper hours arrived. It was not infrequent that a pitcher might heave up a whole shock of bundles with one powerful spurt of action to assure an early return to home base and food. Neither field man nor bundle hauler were too meticulous just before dinner or supper.
In the pre-blower days it was assumed every separator had a stacker; i.e. the straw would be carried from the separator by a continuous slatted conveyer; it should be explained that this was eventually replaced by a blower, a practice at first despised by the old-timer because it tore the straw into little bits and blew dust all over creation and couldn't stack the
damned stuff nohow. So when stackers were in vogue, one of the most important men in the threshing ring was the straw stack man. He could usually be identified as a tobacco chewing oldster who couldn't smoke on the straw pile but could build a hell of a good rain-proof straw stack that would stand up and look like a straw stack should. Another important civilian cog in
thresher ring was the bagger. He was usually so skilled at filling the grain bags that he moved automatically, from sitting to sitting. It would be sacrilege to ever think of appointing anyone else as head bagger, he usually had a helper, someone with a strong back and endurance to set the bags back away from the separator or onto the grain wagon. The bagger man too was a tobacco-chewing elder "who'd been "around".
A job this writer always envied was the grain hauler. I would have rather had his team of beautiful big Clydesdales with the white fetlocks and big clapping feet and the shiny new spangled squeaking harness. I would rather have had that shiny wagon with three-side-boarded box, with the shiny slick floor from all the sacks being dragged forth and back at the threshing
rig and at the granary. I would rather have had the muscles of those mighty men who could pick up a sack of wheat, or oats, or barley, or rye and heave it open-ended to an oat bin. I would rather have this one unit of the threshing unit because it attracted the pretty, giggly, farm girls and their city cousins who found it more fun to ride on a grain wagon from the threshing rig to the granary than on the narrow gage railroad from Woodman to Fennimore. I would rather have been the grain hauler man then President of the United States. Teddy Roosevelt may have been a bull moose and he may have had giggly girls riding on his band wagon but he couldn't have picked up a full bag of wheat, raise it above his head, and heave it into a grain bin.
Come to think of it, the whole blame business of thrashing was exciting, it was homogenous, it was necessary even though the thrashers left dirty table cloths and bed linens; even though being delegated to second table was discrimination of the first magnitude; and even
though there were near-feuds resulting from disagreement over whether the threshing rig would start the season on the upper end or the lower end or Kincannon's Ridge, everybody looked forward to the thrashing season as sort of a winder-upper of the harvest season. It's true that he would later have to pick corn but that was a personal, a family job and therefore lacked the luster of working together. Getting right down to it, a wood-cutting bee was more pleasureful than the dull routine of picking corn.
I hope you have enjoyed
Thank you for reading this and the next time you see a lonely combine working in the fields, air conditioned, tape deck, efficient and powerfull... think back to the early 1900's, listen for the sounds of yesterday, the silent steam engines, the horses, the breeze alive with "community". A way of life that can be no more.
