"Uncle
Orrin is going to thresh to-morrow.
Barbara is going to haul water for him."
--Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Salina, Kans., July 15,
1942.
Farmers shared labor by forming
threshing crews that went from farm to farm to thresh wheat (i.e., pitching the
stalks of wheat into a machine that separated the grain from the rest of the
plant). My aunt Barbara was fourteen
years and taking on the role often assigned to children when threshing parties
came through: hauling water. My Dad
wrote the following about threshing when he was younger. “Threshing wheat was
an annual task which I remember vividly for the first time in the torrid summer
of 1936. Bill Hill owned the community's
threshing machine, and George Tribble the steam engine which towed the thresher
between farms at about two miles an hour.
Farmers traded labor with one another, and the threshing crew of two
dozen men had a welcome morning off if the move were distant. Ordinarily farm life was isolated and
solitary. Threshing wheat was a very
exciting event because it brought a multitude of neighbors and workers to our
place for a day or two.... For making the rounds every half hour on my horse
Old Tony, I made fifty cents, and had a few dollars of my own at the end of the
season.” Farmers began acquiring
combines in the 1940s, which combined harvesting and threshing. This new technology eliminated the shared
labor of threshing crews.
(source: Sidney DeVere Brown, Kansas Farmboy: A Memoir of Boyhood and
Youth [2008])
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