LOCAL FARMERS REMINISCE OF A TIME WHEN LIFE WAS SIMPLER, BUT NOT NECESSARILY EASIER

The early 1900s, those were the good old days, they say. Life was simpler then, they say. And many who lived through those times would agree.
Those were good old days. Families not only lived together, they worked together, played together, studied together, prayed together.
Life was simpler then. The fortunate ones had a single set of "Sunday go to Meetin"' church clothes, likely sewn by mom by the light of a candle or kerosene lamp. Fashion statements weren't necessary, and name brand clothes hadn't been invented yet.
Running water meant running with the buckets to the old hand pump on the well or cistern, or even a nearby spring.
Plumbing was never a problem - there was none. There were no arguments about putting the toilet seat down or forgetting to flush. The little wooden house out back, with the half moon cut out above the door, didn't have seats, and it didn't flush.
There was no Internet or television to distract the youngsters from their studies. There was no electricity, so there was no monthly bill to pay. The food on the table came from the garden, and the milk from the family cow. There was no air conditioning on the tractors. There were no tractors. There was no expensive machinery to maintain or make monthly payments on. Yes, life was simpler then, but not necessarily easier.
Without the machines of modern day times, all the labor on the farm was by hand or horse. One might imagine standing at the corner of a large field of oats, overlooking the golden crop as it swayed gently in the breeze. Standing with scythe in hand, in the hot July sun, it must have seemed a daunting task, knowing that all must be cut by hand to prepare for the threshing ahead.
According to Waukon resident Gilman Kolsrud, in earlier times oats were cut with a large scythe equipped with a cradle to hold the cut crop. Tipping the cradle when it was full left a small pile of cut oats on the ground. As the man with the scythe continued, others would gather up the small piles, bind them with a piece of straw, and place them in small stacks called shocks.
Shocking of the oats was not a willy nilly process. It was done deliberately and with purpose. Two bundles would be placed leaning against each other with the cut ends down. Four more would be added, then one placed on top to keep out the rain.
Shocking of the oats was necessary to allow the grain to dry. With the shocking process, the straw contacted the ground, thereby keeping the oats off the ground, allowing the air to circulate and dry them out. When dry, the crop would be gathered up and transported by horse-drawn wagon to the building area of the farm, where the crop would be pounded with wooden paddles to separate the oats from the straw. The straw would be piled for cattle bedding and the oats placed in the granary for feed.
"That process," said Gilman, who is now 91, "was before my time. When I was old enough to help with the threshing, we had a binder."
He went on to add that the grain binder was quite a remarkable machine for those times. It was pulled by three or four horses or mules and had a sickle, which could cut a six to seven foot swath. A reel behind the sickle would pick up the oats and drop them on a platform canvas. From the platform canvas, two vertical canvases, called elevator canvases, rotated in opposite directions and lifted the oats up into the packer. When the bundle got big enough, a lever would trip and a needle arm would swing up and over the bundle and tie it with twine.
Once it was tied, the bundle would be kicked out and two men following would pick it up and add it to a shock.
Once the oats had dried, which took a couple of weeks, the shocks would be gathered and stacked in the field with the cut ends of the straw to the outside and the oats to the inside. The stacks would rise to about thirty feet high and, generally, there would be about four stacks.
Normally, at least one neighbor would have a threshing machine, another marvelous invention for its time. The owner would be paid three to four cents for each bushel of grain threshed in his machine. When the threshing machine was available, it would be pulled between stacks in the field, during which time threshing would commence.
Threshing time was exciting for the children. All the neighbors would gather to help and those too young to help could spend the day in play, watching the threshing process or riding on the horse-drawn wagons as they made their way back and forth from the fields.
Threshing time for the adults was just plain hard work.
"I threshed more grain than I want to remember," said Vernon Gallagher. "It was hot, dirty, dusty, hard work. When we worked in the Dakotas, where the harvest was later in the year, we made a little over a dollar a day, more than we could make around here."
He continued, "The first job we were hired for out there, we were taken to an 80-acre field of barley that had already been cut. It needed to be bundled and shocked. Compared with oats and wheat, all of which were grown around this area, barley was the worst stuff to work with. It had sharp husks, called 'beards,' that would get into your clothes and scratch your skin. It added to the discomfort of the heat and dust as you went about your job."
The early threshing machines were powered by steam engines, which required firewood for the burner and a ready supply of water for the boiler.
"We used a horse-drawn, 300-gallon water tank with a hand pump on it," said Gilman. "We would drive it down to the creek and pump it full."
It took about 13 men to make the operation work. One would tend the threshing machine. Two men would tend each stack to pitch the bundles into the machine. Big machines could handle four men pitching bundles, smaller machines two men. The bundles were pitched directly from the stacks or the wagons. Three-tined pitch forks were used to pitch them.
"When pitching the bundles," said Vernon, "you tried to hit them so the fork went under the twine. That kept them balanced better and they fed into the machine more efficiently. If the bundles were not pitched right, some of the grain was lost. The bundles were pitched in with the grain first, and you were careful not to get the bundles overlapped because that would plug up the machine.
"Not often, but every once in a while, someone would get tired from pitching bundles all day and pitch one on top of another so they could get a lemonade break. The plugged up machine would make the machine owner hopping mad. While everyone else was taking a break, he would have to crawl in there and clean out the mess."
The oats would come out of the hopper through a Y-shaped pipe and be caught in sacks by men stationed at each end of the "Y." Flowing out in dusty half bushel spurts, about two bushels would fill a sack. The sacks would be loaded onto a horse-drawn wagon by a three-man crew, who would haul them to the granary and empty them into the oat bin. Generally there were two wagons dedicated to hauling the grain to the granary.
"They couldn't waste any time," said Gilman, "because there would be another load waiting for them by the time they got back. You needed about 100 sacks to keep things going. Everyone brought sacks with their names painted or stenciled on them. They wanted to make sure they got their own sacks back when the job was done, because not everyone took good care of their sacks."
Perhaps the toughest and dirtiest job was the stacking of the straw. The straw was blown out of the threshing machine in a wide arc nearly 40 feet long. Two men armed with pitch forks would move along in the blower stream as it moved back and forth, tossing the expelled straw onto a growing, half moon-shaped pile. They wore red handkerchiefs around their necks to keep the itchy dust out of their clothes.
"Those guys would finish the day so dirty you almost wouldn't recognize them," said Gilman.
Gilman's wife, Alphia, added, "I always felt sorry for those guys doing the stacking. It was such a hot and dirty job."
"Yes," Gilman replied, "it was, but the same guys usually volunteered to do it."
Over the years, the process changed and the shocked oats were gathered from the field and taken directly to the threshing machine, which was set up nearer to the buildings.
"The wagons were eight feet by sixteen feet," Gilman noted, "and it took about eight wagons with hay racks to get the shocks moved quickly enough." This process allowed the machine to be set up wherever the farmer wanted it. Some would have it placed so the straw could be blown right into the barn, while others might want it stacked conveniently close by.
Eventually, the process changed again, to the point that each farm family moved their own shocks to the threshing site, well before the threshing day arrived. The bundles were stacked at the threshing site, pending the arrival of the machine. With nothing ever certain in farming, particularly the weather, the manner in which the bundles were stacked frequently determined the final volume of the crop that made it to the granary.
"Some people stacked their bundles with pitch forks," Gilman said. "My dad stacked them by hand, working on his knees. He began with a bundle in the middle, then laid out bundles, with the cut ends out, in a circle about twenty feet in diameter. As he built the stack, the first few layers would extend outward gradually, creating an effect much like the eaves on a house. The next layers would be gradually lapped in about half the length of the bundle, always with the cut ends out and the oats to the middle. As the stack grew, I would be in the middle, catching the bundles as they were tossed from the wagons and passing them on to Dad. It took about fourteen wagon loads for each stack, and we usually had about ten to twelve stacks."
Earl Iverson of rural Waterville noted that the stacks of oats, when done right, were like a fine work of art. "They were really pretty, and they allowed you to delay the threshing until you had more time or the weather was right.
"As the threshing machines improved and got bigger, it took more people to do the job," Earl said. "I remember the first threshing machine that our neighbor, John Hendrickson, had. It was a 36-inch Red River Special. It had a big steam engine and great big wings on each side so you could feed the bundles from both sides."
Earl's wife, Vivian, noted, "The whole machine itself was made out of wood, not metal."
"John later got a big Minneapolis-Moline," Earl continued. "This newer threshing machine was powered by a kerosene fueled Oil Pull, which did away with firewood handling. The rear wheels on the Oil Pull were huge, at least 8 feet tall."
The Oil Pull, according to Vernon Gallagher, was actually one of the first tractors. It was used to pull the threshing machine from place to place, and was called an Oil Pull because it had an oil-cooled engine, an innovative new technology for the times. The engine had a metal coil through which the oil flowed. The exhaust from the engine was directed upward through an exhaust unit on the chimney or smokestack. The hot air rising through the exhaust unit pulled cooler air from below through the oil filled coil, cooling the oil.
The Oil Pull was equipped with a large drive pulley, which was connected to the cylinder pulley on the threshing machine with a wide canvas drive belt. "Machine owners with a lot of money had leather drive belts," Vernon noted.
The Oil Pull presented a challenge to the machine owner. "To start the thing," Earl said, "John would take a bay fork rope and wind it round and round the big drive pulley, then tie it to a Model "T" Ford. He would take off in the Model "T" and hope the machine would start. Sometimes the machine would backfire and stop that Model "T" dead in its tracks or even lift it right off the ground. It took a damn good rope for that job.
"On threshing days you had to get an early start on your own chores," Earl added, "because you had to get your team of horses harnessed and on the road by 8 a.m. You might have to travel a mile or more to get over to the neighbor's to get started when the dew was off the shocks."
While the men worked in the fields, the women worked to prepare meals. The family whose fields were being worked would provide the food. Pies and cakes would be baked and sandwiches prepared and delivered to the men in the field mid-morning, then again in the afternoon. Work ceased temporarily for a full noon meal at the house, and an evening supper was prepared for those who did not need to rush home to do their own chores.
Earl remembers "good food piled high and coffee in tin cups so hot it would burn your fingers. It might have been ninety degrees in the shade, but that hot coffee went mighty good with the sandwiches and cake. Threshing was hard work, but we had fun doing it. Farming itself is hard work, but it's a good life and I would hope and pray that the youngsters today can have as good a life as this old lad has had.
"You had real friends in those days," Earl added, "your neighbors." That, perhaps, despite the hardships, is what made them the "good old days."
Note: Anyone interested in reminiscing about the "good old days" or providing their children a glimpse into how things were done when "times were simpler" will have that opportunity this weekend during the Waukon Days celebration.
The oats are shocked on the hillside behind Sweeney's Village Farm and Home, located just south of Waukon. According to Joe Sweeney, everyone is welcome to stop by the field, look them over and take pictures if they like. Some of the shocks will be hauled to the fairgrounds starting Wednesday evening, but Joe expects that there will be some remaining in the field throughout the weekend.
Saturday and Sunday afternoons, from noon to 4 p.m., the oats will be threshed using an old steam-powered Minneapolis-Moline threshing machine in the east parking area behind the buildings at the fairgrounds. Other demonstrations will include baling with a horse-drawn baler, cutting wood with a vintage sawmill, and making wood shingles.
There are a tremendous number of entertaining and educational events scheduled throughout the weekend. Come out and enjoy!