Threshing was also a time to celebrate a good harvest and to give thanks. With the grain in the bins and if prices were good the farmers might even have a little extra money in the bank again. Part of the celebration was socializing with your neighbors as they work together each day as a community for a number of weeks in the summer, and then there was the delicious meal and lunches prepared by the farmers wives and their helpers.
For the children who were too young to work it was a time of excitement as they watched what was happening on their farm. As young kids we would sit along our driveway and wait for the arrival of the thrashing rig of Albert Bosch to come rumbling into our yard. The threshing machine was huge and noisy and pulled by a large steel-wheeled green Huber tractor.
The tractor was driven from farm to farm by Tony Luurtsema, who was Albert Bosch's assistant for the threshing season. The first sign that the thrashing rig was coming soon was the arrival of Albert Bosch with his 1929 Model A Ford pickup truck. He always had a 55 gallon barrel in the back to carry gasoline for the tractor when the rig arrived. Albert would determine along with the farm owner where to position the machine. Soon there was a parade of wagons with hayracks pulled by horses or tractors ready to load up the shocks of wheat that were out in the field. The farmers who had tractors needed drivers to move the wagons from shock to shock as the wagon was loaded. I started driving tractor shock to shock when I was 10 years old and I went from farm to farm for the whole threshing season. Doing this. job was great fun as almost every farmer had a different model of tractor to drive. We also got to eat with the adults at the first noon meal each day.
Farming has always been a dangerous occupation and threshing was no exception. Many years ago, in 1924, the Southwest threshing crew experienced a tragedy. While thrashing on his own farm on Bingham Street, Johannes Blauwkamp slipped and fell while pitching bundles of grain from above the threshing machine. He landed on the barn floor with severe injuries. He died the next day. He left a widow and eight children all under 16 years of age. With help from family and neighbors and the church his widow was able to stay on the farm and bring up her children there to adulthood.
When we thrashed at our own farm, threshing wasn't so much fun. My father always wanted the threshing machine pushed partly into the barn so the new straw could be blown into the back mows of the barn. The most dusty and dirty job of thrashing for the host farmer was packing down the loose straw with his pitchfork. The next most dusty job was steering the blower. This was done by cranking a heavy wheel which moved the blower from left to right. This was my job and I hated it. With all the dust in the barn there were times when I could not see my father as he moved from one side of the mow to the next. There were times when I thought he had been buried alive under all the loose straw. When are barn was filled with all the loose straw that it could hold, the machine was pulled out of the barn. The rest of our straw was then blown into a huge stack next to our barn.
For the farmer's wife, threshing time was also a time of hard work planning the menus, baking, and cooking the huge meal on a hot summers day for a large group of people. There were also a few ladies at this time of the year who question why they have ever married a farmer. Sometimes there was a little neighborhood competition as to who would put on the best feast, but most of the time they would lend each other a helping hand on threshing days. The schedule for the threshing day was lunch at 9:30 a.m., dinner at 12 p.m., and lunch again in the afternoon. At noon the threshing machine would come to a halt and the crew would wash up and head into the house. Most families did not have a table large enough for the large crew, so often two tables were placed side-by-side if possible. Before eating the host farmer offered a prayer of Thanksgiving and ask for a blessing upon the food and then the feast began. The hot meal usually consisted of a variety of meats with potatoes and gravy. There was often fresh bread and other side dishes. There was water, coffee, and cold lemonade to drink and there were a variety of fresh baked pies for dessert. The meat platter went round and round and mounds of mashed potatoes disappeared from the bowls as they were passed around. The crew ate their fill and the ladies were rewarded for all their hard work with generous praise for the good meal. There were also soft drink breaks where you could go into the milk house and get a nice cold bottle of pop out of the milk cooler. For adults there sometimes was also a bottle of cold beer.
As World War II was coming to a close the combine was rapidly replacing the grain binder and the threshing machine. Combining grain was much less labor-intensive. By the year 1950 the era of communal thrashing was coming to an end. Each passing year we would lose a few farmers from our crew. In 1953 our threshing group decided to disband. Some farmers purchased a small combine. A few others like my father bought a smaller threshing machine and thrashed his grain with two of our neighbors.
I remember driving home their tractors as we brought in the grain from the fields. They owned Farmalls, John Deeres, MMs, Fords, and Allis Chalmers.
Albert Bosch had a brother Jacob Bosch who also owned a large threshing rig. He thrashed the grain on most of the farms located east of Borculo with his son John Raymond Bosch which is where they lived.
I always wanted to own a farm someday as a boy growing up in Borculo. I finally got to do this in 1965 when I bought a large farm with my brother-in-law Laverne Luurtsema at 4400 Port Sheldon Street. We also raised wheat on our farm. Our wheat crop was harvested with a self-propelled combine owned by Vern Ensing
In later years our farm was transformed into a modern residential subdivision called Sunningdale.
On the farms in this area the era of the threshing machine has long since ended and is today only a memory of the past.