Hit-and-miss engines were a hit with farmers — Part 2

Part two of a three-part series

As described in last week’s column, around the year 1900, one cylinder gasoline engines started to appear on almost every farm where they revolutionized local agriculture. While in the late 19th century the horse drawn reaper, modern plows, and the mowing machine started to mechanize agriculture, it was the gasoline engine that ushered in a whole new world of farming.

There were numerous applications for the seemingly limitless power the hit-and-miss engine provided, but this week’s column will focus on just one: the wheat harvest.

Wheat, the source of bread and pastry flour, always had a ready market; but its culture was labor intensive. Consider that in the early 19th century, say 1830, the following steps were necessary to harvest a bushel of wheat to take to the mill.

First, the ripe grain had to be cut with a sickle or the cradle, a kind of scythe with long, wooden fingers that caught the grain and made it possible to lay it in a neat windrow. Then the wheat was raked together and bound into sheaves and the sheaves stacked so as to shed rain. The sheaves were forked up onto a hay wagon that carried them to the barn. At the barn they were forked up onto an elevation to the right of the thresh floor. Later in the fall and winter they were dropped down onto the thresh floor where the men beat the grain from the stalks with flails. It was said that all throughout fall and winter the rhythmic “thump thump thump” of the flail could be heard in most every barn.

At this point the grain was still mixed with chaff and needed to be dropped into a hand cranked fanning machine that blew the light chaff out while the heavier grain dropped through screens to be collected at the bottom and bagged for mill or market. By my count the wheat was handled nine times, and much of it was stoop, back-breaking, field labor.

So it’s easy to see why when Cyrus McCormick demonstrated the “McCormick Reaper” in Chicago at mid-century people cheered and threw hats into the air and shouted “That’s it! That’s it!” The reaper was a horse drawn sickle bar mowing machine with a revolving paddle wheel that cut the wheat and automatically placed it in a neat windrow ready for tying into sheaves.

A few decades later came the binder which not only cut the wheat but, using a mechanical knotter and “binder twine” also made the sheaves.

But the bottle-neck still lay with the slow process of threshing the grain with flails. There were numerous early threshing machines powered by belts from horse treadmills. Although faster than flail threshing, horse treadmill threshers were hardly up to the job. However, with the new gasoline engine there was power to spare and the large wooden threshing machine was quickly developed. By 1910 there were over forty manufacturers in the U.S., one of which was the Ellis Keystone Company in Pottstown which made three different sizes. The largest one, the “Number 3,” weighed over two tons.

Some farmers placed the threshing machine in the barn on the thresh floor, some just outside the barn. With a large hit-and-miss engine and wide belt to carry the power, the whole contraption shook and roared as sheaves were fed into a chute where rapidly revolving toothed drums battered the wheat from stalks and fans winnowed the chaff away. A large high speed fan blew the straw up a pipe and into the straw mow while the finished grain flowed out a chute into a waiting bag. It was seemingly miraculous! But the miracles were not over.

A 1910 report noted that “Today there are over twenty-five concerns building agricultural tractors. Nearly every back yard machine shop has a tractor in development.” With the arrival of tractors the next step in wheat harvesting was to combine the thresher with the engine and pull the whole thing around the field with a tractor. In short, take the thresher to the wheat rather than the wheat to the thresher. By the 1920’s a number of light weight, air cooled engines had been developed, the most popular being the “Wisconsin”; and by the late ’30s, light weight “combines” could be seen in local fields. These continued into the 1950s. Some readers may recall these combines where a man rode atop the machine and tied shut the burlap bags which were then slid down a chute to be collected and taken to the barn. Before long the bagger was replaced by a bin.

Finally the tractor itself was subsumed into the contraption and the modern self propelled combine was invented. Today one man in an air conditioned cab and with no more effort than one hand on a control stick can guide these massive behemoths around a halfdozen or more fields in a day intermittently off loading the grain into waiting trucks. It is somewhat ironic, I suppose, that now, with harvest so easy, there are almost no fields left here to harvest.

It is worth noting that before about 1960 in New Hanover and surrounding townships, all land was devoted to agriculture: fields were regularly tilled and the flood plains of most streams were cow pastures. Suburban “sprawl” as we see it today did not exist here.