An old-time harvest event doesn’t necessarily happen every year at the Hochstetler farm, but it does when a need arises. The last time was in 2016. Two circumstances converged this year to make it necessary again. Melvin Hochstetler needed help with medical bills, and a series of other, pandemic related cancellations of agricultural events, including one in Burr Oak, meant that a friend had several wagonloads of wheat in a barn that needed to be threshed.
Family members and friends mobilized to organize a breakfast fundraiser, convene the necessary people and equipment to do the threshing, and get the word out. On Saturday morning, several hundred people from the nearby community turned out to eat a home-cooked breakfast of eggs, pancakes, homemade sausage, biscuits and gravy, and fresh doughnuts, and to watch as volunteers operated a variety of antique equipment.
Using vintage steam and gasoline tractors and belt-driven machinery, the volunteers sawed logs into boards, husked and shelled corn and shredded the stalks, and thrashed wheat, baling the leftover straw. Draft horses pulled wagon rides around the farm’s property and over an old railroad grade, and a small lawn tractor towed children around in a train made of old barrels with wheels attached.
At one time, in the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries, fall harvest events that brought together entire communities and extended families. Work that combined physical labor with the work of machinery was so commonplace as to be the norm. Amid the many large, modern, diesel-powered harvesting and processing machines visible today on St. Joseph County’s roads and in its fields, Amish, Brethren, and Mennonite farms accomplish their work through a variety of means that make use of both physical labor and old but tried-and-true equipment.
Saturday’s event presented the basic technological system in a microcosm. In their heyday, threshing rigs traveled from farm to farm, performing their work as a contract service. The job of a threshing machine is to separate the edible part of the wheat from the straw, essentially by beating and shaking it. Unlike modern contracting arrangements, the local farmers and their families pitched in with the contract rig’s work, so harvest time was a truly immersive event.
Even though the thresher came from a nearby friend over the weekend, the immersive nature of the work was the same. Family members and volunteers climbed atop wagons to pitch wheat bundles into the machine. Another operated the steam engine that drove the thresher, while others watched the belts and machinery to ensure it was performing correctly. At the machine’s side, forced air blew the separated wheat from a spout into a wagon, while at the far end, another spout deposited the leftover straw in a pile on the ground.
Other machines did different jobs throughout the day. One was a belt-driven sawmill. Using cant hooks, which resemble large, spiked tongs on the end of a long, wooden handle, groups of volunteers and family members rolled three-foot-wide, hardwood logs onto a flat carriage that moved them back and forth along a track past a circular saw blade. One person rode and operated the carriage, and as the logs moved toward the blade, the operator made an adjustment that moved the log into the blade’s bath at just the right place to saw off a two-inch board. Over and over, the workers turned the log in the carriage to keep cutting off planks, alternately, from all sides of the log.
While the logs were being sawed and the wheat was being threshed, a corn shredding operation was also underway. Bunches of field-dried corn on the stalk are fed into the machine, which cuts the ears from the stalk, shucks them, and ejects them from a spout. The stalks are chopped up and come from a separate spout. The chopped stalks and leaves can be spread on a field and eventually turned into the soil to decompose.
The ears can be fed through a corn sheller, which has internal machinery that sort of resembles a mechanical pencil sharpener and removes the kernels from the cob. A small “hit-and-miss” one-cylinder gas engine powered the sheller at Saturday’s harvest event, with a narrow rubber belt providing the power transmission. Hit-and-miss engines have a device on them called a governor. Unlike a present-day car’s engine, where the cylinders fire on every revolution, a hit-and-miss engine’s governor only permits it to fire once it drops below a certain speed. The “pops” of the cylinder firing can come at random, which gives the engine its name.
John David Yoder, who lives about half a mile down the road from the Hochstetler farm, said he bought the engine from a farmer in northern Indiana who was the son of its original owner. The engine was built by John Deere in 1929 and powered a pump that irrigated a mint crop. That original owner, Yoder said, told him he remembered “the day when dad came home with it.”
Another Deere hit-and-miss engine, belonging to Sam Fisher of northern Indiana, churned ice cream for Fisher’s Ice Cream stand, which he and his wife take around to fairs and festivals. Fisher’s engine dates to 1928 and has belonged to him since 2005.
For Fisher and his ice cream stand, Saturday’s event was helpful. This summer, a total of 10 events that he usually attends were cancelled amid the ongoing pandemic. Saturday was Fisher’s first time at the Hochstetler farm, and it provided him an opportunity operate his engine and sell his product.
Fisher recently had his engine rebuilt with a brand-new cylinder. The engine’s piston moves back and forth horizontally, which compounds other, uneven forces inside the cylinder. Over time, Fisher said, the cylinder wore from a circle to an egg-shaped profile. “There are still people who work on them and restore them,” Fisher said, which brings him an opportunity to show off “something unusual for our generation.”
Fisher said that although using antique machinery to make his ice cream can present unique challenges, at events like the one Saturday, “if something goes wrong, there’s always someone there to help.”
John Deere products were in abundance on Saturday, as were a variety of other makes of vintage farm equipment. There were several early-to-mid 20th century gasoline tractors from Deere, Farmall, and Oliver. Another early type of internal combustion machine, a Rumely Oil-Pull tractor, traded off with the others to run the sawmill. On the threshing machine was a steam tractor made by J.I. Case.
Steam tractors resemble antique locomotives, and work on much the same principle. Fuel, usually wood or coal, is burned in a firebox. The heat from the firebox boils water in the confined space of a boiler, which is the long, cylindrical feature that gives steam tractors and locomotives their distinctive appearance. Because steam has high elasticity, it can be compressed, and in a boiler steam is generated under compression.
Compressed steam exerts a great deal of force. That force drives the engine. Steam pushes on a piston inside a cylinder, which pushes on a crank, and the crank turns. Through gearing, that drives the tractor, or “traction engine” as it is properly called, in forward or reverse. The crank also turns a large pulley to which wide leather or canvas belts are attached. These turn external machinery like sawmills or threshers.
In order to get the steam engine to perform as efficiently as possible, a hot fire is necessary. Even after the steam does its work in providing force and motion to the engine, it is still pressurized. Pipes direct the exhaust steam to the front of the engine. A nozzle ejects it into the smokestack. This creates a draft inside the boiler in the same way that a breeze at the top of a chimney draws smoke up from a home fireplace. This draft pulls fresh air into the firebox, making the fuel burn hotter, and drawing the flames through the boiler where it transfers heat into the water more efficiently.
This draft comes in short, loud bursts in a cadence that corresponds with the engine’s speed. There are two bursts of draft for each revolution of the crank, which gives the steam engine its trademark “chugga-chugga” sound. The forced draft also provides an opportunity for a type of visual display unique to gatherings and events that feature steam traction engines: an evening spark show.
When fine, combustible material like wood shavings or dry straw is thrown into the firebox, and the engine is working and producing its rhythmic draft, the force of the draft will draw the lightweight fuel through the boiler and rapidly up and out of the smokestack. It emerges in the form of thousands of tiny, burning embers.
Against an evening sky, the effect is a brilliant light show, accompanied by the sound effects of the working engine. The glow from the firebox periodically lights the operator’s face as more fuel is added, adding to the overall effect. Because it can be a spectacle, a spark show often marks the opening or closing of a steam engine event. For this past weekend’s harvest, activities began Friday evening with a spark show.
The spark show saw around 100 attendees, and Saturday’s breakfast and harvest activities brought perhaps slightly over twice that. Several of Melvin Hochstetler’s sons, who organized and set up the event, said they were happy with the attendance and with the way the event went.
Nathaniel, the oldest son, said “it’s going good. It’s about like 2016. We had a fundraiser then, too,” which he said was for the benefit of another family member’s medical expenses. That event was much like this year’s event, he said, with the exception that wagon rides were new this year.
Mervin Hochstetler, another son of Melvin’s, said, “it turned out pretty good.” Competition from other events, including several auctions, may have kept attendance from being even higher, he said. Despite the amount of physical labor that went into setting up and operating the machinery, the biggest challenge, Nathaniel said, was advertising. “It was just getting it out,” he said. With about four weeks from the event’s conception to plan and execute it, he said, “we had to push it.”
Ben Hochstetler, the youngest son, said he, too, was pleased with the presence of the machinery, the attendance, and what was accomplished over the course of the day. “It’s been awesome for me,” he said. “A lot of work.”
Nathaniel said he was pleased to have had people and equipment from all over. The Case steam engine came from Indiana, while the thresher and the Rumely Oil-Pull came from Burr Oak. The sawmill belongs to an uncle of his. To him, it was that convergence of the equipment, its owners, and other family members and volunteers that made the event a success.
For members of the public who missed this year’s event at the Hochstetler Farm, there are other places to see demonstrations of equipment like that which took place Saturday. Antique engine shows occur across Michiana in the summer and fall each year.
The closest is in Jones. Typically, the St. Joe Valley Old Engine Association (SJVOEA) holds an August show at its show grounds on Bair Lake Street, just over the Cass County Line west of Three Rivers and a short distance south of Highway M-60. This year’s show was cancelled amid the ongoing pandemic, but the event should resume in future years once pandemic concerns and restrictions are no longer in effect.
In the meantime, SJVOEA members display their machines at other events and functions. For members of the public interested in seeking them out, current updates on those activities are maintained on the organization’s website.
Dave Vago is a writer and columnist for Watershed Voice. A Philadelphia native with roots in Three Rivers, Vago is a planning consultant to history and community development organizations and is the former Executive Director of the Three Rivers DDA/Main Street program.
