I wonder what stories this old farmhouse could tell. Did it have lambs, pigs or calves inside to warm up on a frozen winter day. Did the children bring their treasures in to show their mom like frogs and snakes. Or were there kittens playing by the door or a dog playing fetch in the yard.
Old Farm House
The corn fields around the area and all in different stages depending when the farmers were able to get into the fields during the usually wet spring.
Corn Hoping for a Late Freeze
A retrospective look of farming when oat bundles were loaded onto wagons from the oak shocks in the field and hauled to the grain thresher. The one on top can’t be scared of heights as they drive the horse drawn wagon standing up across rough fields.
Loading Oat Bundles
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 bit of sagging and warping in the old boards and even a few boards missing here and there, but the old barn is still standing proud.
Proud Barn
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
Farm machinery has its own type of artwork. This inner circle of the Case Steam Tractor rear wheel makes an interesting pattern. But it isn’t a wheel that you would want to run over your foot as the wheel is five and a half feet in diameter and two feet wide and the steam tractor empty weight is 24,000 pounds. You can see the full wheel on Monday’s picture.
Red Rear Wheel
In 1947, Willys-Overland Motors debuted its Willys Jeep truck that served up everything that a farmer or laborer could want without much else. Buyers could have their truck with a pickup bed or a stake bed, or they could even take home a bare chassis if they liked depending on their needs.
Willys Jeep Truck
The steam tractor was used in rural North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to aid in threshing, in which the owner/operator of a threshing machine or threshing rig would travel from farmstead to farmstead threshing grain. Oats were a common item to be threshed, but wheat and other grains were common as well.
Steam traction engines were often too expensive for a single farmer to purchase, so “threshing rings” were often formed. In a threshing ring, multiple farmers pooled their resources to purchase a steam engine. They also chose one person among them to go to a steam school, to learn how to run the engine properly. There were also threshing contractors, who owned their own engine and thresher, and went to different farms, hiring themselves out to thresh grain.
The steam tractor ran the belts that would turn other equipment like the threshing machine. The big boiler on wheels had water which was heated into steam in a boiler until it reaches a high pressure. When expanded through pistons or turbines, mechanical work is done. The reduced-pressure steam is then condensed and pumped back into the boiler. And on this Case engine, the piston turns the large wheel which turns the belt used to power other equipment.
Case Steam Tractor
This fourteen sided barn, built 105 years ago, looks in fairly good shape. It has a two pitch roof and a nice looking rock foundation.
Fourteen Sided Barn
