Incredible power!!

The immense power of these great machines provoke a visceral reaction. Growing up on a farm in the Midwest my Dad had a cousin who owned a large farm implement business. Over the years he rescued and restored and collected many steam engines and associated equipment. Every year they would hold an exhibition out on the farm where they would harvest and till wheat fields using the old equipment and horses and mules.

As a young teen I spent many hours tossing bundles into the threshing machine with a pitchfork during the exhibition. The sight and sounds and smells of the awesome power of that big iron were incredible and stayed with me. But probably most impressive were the old farmers and engineers who showed up at the events who had actually used and operated those machines on the farms in the late 1800's/early 1900's.

But it wasn't just the machines that drew the old timers. Very few farms were large enough to afford this equipment. Equipment owners would bring the machines to harvest your grain for a fee and would travel a circuit going farm to farm. There was still a lot of manual labor, and horse labor, involved in cutting and transporting the crop to the machine. All the farmers in the area would pool their resources and move from farm to farm with the machines to work together to get each farm's grain in, in turn. Farmer's wives would come together where they were working to prepare the noon meal for the threshers. There were huge appetites from hard working men, and the noon tables were heavily laden with food and sweet tea and lemonade. The minister would show up to bless the meal. Even though the threshing circuits were no longer running when I was a teenager, when a farm wife laid out a big spread the men would remark, "looks like you was cooking for thrashers". Big pot luck suppers always evoked memories of the threshers. My uncle joked that he had to build a second outhouse for when the threshers were there.

The whole thing took on the air of a festival, like a state fair. There was a strong sense of cooperation, and of community. The machines were in the center of it, but I think the social memory of it was a powerful draw for those old farmers and engineers who showed up for those exhibitions.