Labor Day was first celebrated in the United States in 1882, dedicated to the achievements of American workers. It serves as an annual tribute to American workers’ contributions to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of the United States. The first Labor Day celebration was held on September 5, 1882 in New York City, including a parade and picnic. On June 28, 1894, Congress declared Labor Day a federal holiday designating the first Monday in September as Labor Day.

Labor Day usually still meant work for farmers as the cows still needed to be milked and if the weather was good, field work was done and this time of the year, in the past it may have been threshing oats by throwing bundles of oat stalks on a conveyor belt that fed the bundles into the thresher which separated the grain from the stalks.

Laboring on Labor Day

A weekend didn’t mean the end of work for farmers and with the oats ripe, the day might be filled with the threshing crew to separate the oats from the stalks and husks. For thousands of years, grain was separated by hand with flails, and was very laborious and time consuming, taking about one-quarter of agricultural labor by the 18th century. The invention of the thrashing machine or thresher eased the burden of farmers, from the small units to the large ones that often worked in tandem with the steam tractor.

Numerous belts and pulleys turned the gears and conveyors and if everything was working right, the oat kernels would be auger into a wagon and the stalks would be blown on the straw pile. I know I won’t want to be the one figuring out how to put all the belts on and on which pulleys. Or having my fingers any near them when turning!

Grain Thresher Belts