Photographic essay

Before we dive back into the details of early twentieth-century Nebraska farm economics, a brief intermission to give us a flavor of life when Grandpa Chris was a young boy. I am told that, unlike generations that followed, Grandpa’s father Peter P was primarily a wheat farmer. The photograph below would thus represent well what happened at harvest on his substantial acreage.

This photo was taken 24 July 1910 (Grandpa was four) on the farm of T. C. Shawver near Mitchell, Nebraska, in Nebraska’s Panhandle.

Obviously, there were no combines back then, so harvest involved several steps: the harvesters cut the wheat with a scythe, then bound the wheat into sheaves; the wheat sheaves were then hauled to a thresher, where the grain was separated from the chaff.

The first photograph below was taken in 1907 on a farm west of Lexington, Nebraska; the second was a few years earlier (1904) on a farm near Cozad.

We can gain a clearer understanding of the process by zooming in. The first photo below shows the steam engine, which rotated a pulley on the side; a flat, wide belt connected the steam engine to and powered the thresher. The belt is not visible in this photo, since it runs behind the wagon to the left.

The flat belt can be seen to the right of this photo. The thresher itself is mostly obscured behind the wagon in front (but see below). The wheat sheaves were hauled in on the two wagons in front; the wagon to the left rear was where the wheat kernels were deposited after threshing. The wheat chaff and straw was blown into the pile behind.

The photograph below was also taken in 1910 near Kenesaw, Nebraska. Note the belt to the right of the picture running the threshing machine. The sheaves were loaded onto the front of the thresher on what appears to be a conveyer of some sort, then pulled into the thresher where the wheat kernel was separated from the chaff and stem. The kernel was diverted to the left and into the wagon; the rest was blown into the pile to be used in various ways.

The use of steam power was a significant advance over earlier threshing technology, which relied—literally—on horse (and mule) power. The photograph below of a threshing crew working in Custer County, Nebraska, portrays well the process of threshing in 1887, when Peter P was eighteen and still living at home. Notice in the second photo that the horses are walking in a circle to turn the gear that operates the thresher. Note also what appears to be a whip in the hand of the man standing above the horses.

Facts and figures and words are all well and good, but sometimes they pale in comparison to a clear photograph. For more photographs of wheat threshing, go to the Library of Congress American Memory website (here) and search for the word threshing or any other word or phrase that interests you (e.g., wheat harvest).