Harvesting Wheat
Winter wheat is planted in the fall, grows through the spring
and is ready for harvest in the middle of summer. So, harvesting
wheat is hot, dusty labor. In the 1920's the harvest took several
steps, lots of neighbors and all their wives and daughters
to
feed and support the threshers. The process began with a horse-drawn
-- and later, tractor-drawn -- binder that would cut the wheat
stalks and gather them into bundles. The bundles would be stacked
into windrows to dry. Then later all the neighbors would gather
with a huge threshing machine that would separate the wheat
kernels from the straw stalks. The women and girls would
cook huge meals for the crew. Today, the work can be done by
one person on a combine, another to drive the truck to the
elevator
and another to cook.
"When
the wheat is ripe … you would cut it [and] run
it through another part of the binder and put it into bundles
and tie a string around it. And it would be kicked off into
windrows.
Then in the evenings, you would go out … and
put these bundles up in piles so they could dry out, maybe
eight, ten, or a dozen [bundles] in…what they call
a shuck. …Later on, you would go out in the fields
with your bundle rack and pick these up and then run
them
through a threshing machine … and that separated
the wheat from the straw." -- Darrell
Ronne (Quicktime required)
While the men and boys worked in the field, farm women and
girls faced long hours in a steamy hot kitchen, preparing
meals for hungry field hands.
With no microwave oven, refrigerator, or frozen foods to
ease the work, the women cooked and baked for several days
in a row, fixing huge meals for the threshing crews. As with
field work, neighbor women shared the cooking and kitchen
work. At threshing time, even children helped. Older boys
loaded bundles of wheat into the threshing cylinder and piled
up straw that was used later for livestock bedding and to
stuff mattresses. Older girls worked in the kitchen, helping
cook platters of fried chicken, potatoes and gravy, beans
and squash, homemade bread and butter, pies and cakes and
much more to feed the hungry workers. Little girls ran back
and forth to the field, carrying sandwiches and snacks to
workers, and little boys hauled jugs of cool water to workers
in the hot, dusty fields.
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A threshing machine and crew
from 1927. |
Harvey Pickrel lived on a farm his whole life and remembers
threshing season.
"A
big huge, threshing machine…it was a huge old steam
engine that run it. The man that run that, if you happened
to be threshing at your place, he'd come before breakfast,
and he would fire up that steam engine so he'd get enough
steam so he could run that day. And then you had to, the
ladies had to feed him and the man that run the separator
breakfast. And then of course, they had to feed all them
hungry men at noon, and there would be, well there'd be
twelve running the racks and there would be some that hauling the
grain away and the one doing the separator … and
the poor ladies, they sure had to work hard to feed all
those."
-- Harvey
Pickrel (Quicktime required)
Written by Claudia Reinhardt.
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