Thomas was born in 1909 and around 1989 he wrote about his first job, as a fatherless only child, on his mother's farm. He was likely about 8 years old at the time.
Burton sometimes let me operate the reaper and binder, which was used to harvest oats, rye, and wheat. It was drawn by a team of four mules, driven by a black man, Wes Blair as I recall, who rode one of them. I sometimes helped shock the grain after it was cut. The binder left the grain in 10 or 12 inch bundles. "Shocking" was arranging the bundles in "shocks" of four or more, placed with stems down and grain up, leaning against each other so that they would cure and shed rain. Sometimes a bundle or two was place on top of the larger shocks to protect them from rain.
Once the shocks were dry and ready for threshing, they were loaded and hauled to the threshing machine where the threshed grain was bagged and hauled to storage. This process resulted in a large pile of straw which was hauled to the barns for livestock bedding, or composted and spread on the land.
The threshing power was supplied through a drive belt from a tractor powered by steam or gas.
About 30 years later in the mid 1940s, when I was a child on the same farm, my very early memory of field work involved the McCormick Binder. I don't recall specifically that it was oats being harvested but that would be a good guess because oats are an ideal feed grain for horses and mules and, mixed with corn, for sows. I believe that the binder was pulled by a tractor similar to the presentation below.
McCormick Binder pulled by a McCormick Deering W12
The threshing was done exactly as it was 30 years before accept that the threshing power would have been supplied by drive belt from a later model gas tractor. That memory is of the end of an era. The binder and thresher were replaced soon after the war by the combination harvester (combine).
The first ones that I remember were the Allis Chalmers 60 All Crop Harvester.
I recall AC 60 combines that were driven by power take off from the tractor, and also one that carried its own gas engine power unit. There was a bagger platform where a man operated the bagger which was a grain elevator with a Y valve to which two burlap bags were attached. When the one bag became full the operator would flip the Y valve to the other bag, remove the full bag and tie it with twine, and replace an empty bag on the Y valve. The full tied bag would be positioned on a slide chute (like a child's sliding board) off of the bagging platform. The slide chute would hold up to three full bags of grain - which were all slid off onto the ground at once at the opportune time so that the lines of bags radiated out across the field like spokes of a wheel to simplify loading of the bags by the wagon crews. When harvesting 100 bushel per acre oats, this series of tasks was about all one child could do, and I can attest to that. A two bushel bag of oats weighed 65 pounds and I weighed little, if any, more. In the relative late June cool of the next morning, the bags of grain were unloaded and toted or conveyed into the barn and emptied on a pile and the bags reused that day.
The AC 60 pictured above has a bulk grain bin but the first bulk grain bin that I remember was on a self propelled Allis Chalmers that came next, and was the first of a series, over the next 30 years, of larger and larger combine harvesters.
The old threshing machine remained on the scrap pile on what became the site of the grain storage bins and was cut up for scrap metal to make way for the grain drying and storage bins in the 1960s.
NOTE: Burton (Ashe) was farm overseer for about 20 years until his death and was Lawton Ashe's brother.
NOTE: To see the original detailed brochure for the 1903 McCormick Binder, go to http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1467&context=tractormuseumlit (an interesting presentation).
NOTE: The images presented in this post are Google Images.
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If you would like to see my collection of Carolina Lowcountry memories—"Magnolia Elegy: Place In the Edisto Fork," you can view the book trailer here, and see the book page here on the publisher's website. The book is also available from Amazon, B&N, and your independent local bookseller.
