It took a lot of work to harvest a crop of wheat, more than one farmer and his family could do by themselves. But when people worked together they could accomplish a lot in a short amount of time. That's what made harvest time such a special time to remember some 60 years later.
See still images (images 1-40 | images 41-80) taken from this part of the film!
Raising Wheat in Tennessee
Farmers in the southeastern United States raise winter wheat. This type of wheat grows well in climates that don't have extremely cold winters. It is sown in the late fall using a wheat drill like this one and sprouts before winter sets in. By late spring it is ready for harvest.
Cutting Wheat with a Binder
The first stage of the harvest is to cut the wheat with a binder. This piece of equipment cuts the wheat and ties it into bundles.
I've cut a lot of wheat in my lifetime. We'd get out here and cut wheat all over the country here, about three hundred acres, maybe four [hundred acres or 120-160 Ha], for $2.00 a acre.
We had a ten foot [3m] cut binder on the last, we'd cut thirty acres a day. But now as a rule binders was about six and seven [feet or 1.8-2.1 m]. But that last binder we had was a ten foot cut. You could cut twenty-five or thirty acres [10-12 Ha] a day if you'd not have any troubles.
We'd get started about 9:30, 10:00, 'til the dew get off and work 'til dark. We didn't want to cut it when the dew was on it. It would take till about 9:00 before we could ever get started anyway because we had to grease it and get everything ready to start with to get everything going. We cut a lot of wheat, sure did.
Now you seen them cut wheat down here for the Threshing Show, you know. I didn't even think the thing would tie the first bundle but it did. It done a wonderful job. And that fellow that rode the binder knowed what he was doing. He's a good man. Now he's got a mechanical head on him. Good fellow.
—Paul Swann
Memories of Threshing Wheat
They threshed wheat a little earlier than they do it now. See, what happened, you had to cut the wheat while it was just a little green to keep from losing all the wheat out of the head. And they'd shock it and let dry in the shock and then go and start threshing.
I remember the heat, the food, and the camaraderie of everybody that followed these things around. Basically what happened back then, Dad would go from farm to farm and it was kind of like a club. All these farmers would help one another. So Dad would go to one farm and thresh all of his wheat and all of the neighbors would be there helping him. Then he'd leave there and go to another farm and start threshing wheat.
I can remember my dad would sometimes be on the separator and he would take a BB pistol and shoot one of the mules in the rear end and, of course, they'd go crazy. He told me one time an old farmer had a little team of mules with a harness about three times too big. He did that to them and they backed out of the harness and went home. Left him there at the separator with the wagon.
All the women in the neighborhood too, would bring food there. You know, they'd eat. It was just a big community gathering is what it amounted to. The food, you know, they'd eat well. It was all country cooking.
Basically, that's how I remember it — lot of hard work.
—Jackie Swann
We always pulled the thresher out the 20th of June. That was his date that we always started threshing wheat.
Well, it would take about twenty-five or thirty wagons. And we always had about two [men] at the thresher and one to fire the engine and then one to haul water. It was about four that went with the thresher, and the rig.
But now, they threshed in clubs. And we'd go through that club, there would be another ready, waiting for you to start on another club, you see.
We threshed every crop of wheat from Cross Plains to Springfield one year. Wound up down there at the lake. That's where I threshed the last straw stack and pulled it in and drove it home. We was out about three weeks that year. Threshed a lot of wheat.
We run about a thousand bushel [35 m3] a day—dime a bushel. And that had to be a good day to get a thousand bushels.
—Paul Swann
Separator Maintenance and Preparation
Engine maintenance was only part of the morning routine for the threshing crew. While steam pressure was building in the engine the crew could turn their attention to the separator. Lubrication was a daily chore. Other tasks were done as needed. The belts, for example, would have to be removed if there had been a heavy rain to keep them dry. If the belts got wet they would have poor traction and slip.
The windstacker is the exhaust for the straw and chaff. It would need to be unstowed from its traveling position each time the separator was set up at a different farm.
The mechanism that swings the windstacker into position behind the separator could be powered by a pulley with a drive belt as well as a hand crank. Then the windstacker could be set to oscillate and spread the straw stack over a larger area.
Some farmers would build a skeleton shed over the spot where the straw stack was to go. By the time all the farmer's wheat had been threshed the straw stack would completely cover the shed on all sides but one. The following winter the farmer could put his cows in the old wheat field and there would be a shelter ready for them to use when the weather was bad. Other farmers may have chosen to bale their straw so they could move it into a barn. Of course, new straw meant fresh mattress filling in everyone's beds.
While all this activity is taking place at the engine and the separator, and after the dew burns off, the teamsters would head out to the field to pick up their first loads of wheat. Their job would be to keep a continuous stream of wheat coming to the separator. The separator was to run all day long with only a break for lunch planned.
The Threshing Show of today takes place a full month later than when the wheat would have normally been threshed. So, rather than leave the wheat shocked in the field for that time, it is picked up on the day it is cut and stored in a barn. But the job these teamsters have remains the same.
How the Separator Works
The separator performs two jobs in the process of harvesting wheat: it threshes the wheat to separate it from the stalk and winnows the grain to remove the chaff.
The Threshing Process
When the bundles of wheat are first fed into the separator they come to two parts that handle the job. One of these parts is the concave. This is a nonmoving metal framework that is curved and has teeth that point inward.
The other part is the cylinder. It sits inside the concave. It is also a metal framework and has teeth that point outward. The cylinder rotates and as it does its teeth pass between the teeth on the concave. As the wheat comes into this area the teeth on the cylinder grabs the wheat and pulls it through the teeth on the concave. This action strips the heads of grain from the stalks, threshing the wheat. The grain then drops through the concave onto the grain pan below.
The distance between the concave and the cylinder is adjustable. This allows the separator to thresh other types of grain like barley, oats or rice.
The stalks or straw comes out of the back side of the concave and lands on a conveyer system made of several metal parts called straw walkers. These parts move the straw to the rear of the separator where it can be blown out the windstacker.
There is a second, smaller cylinder that is located just behind the main cylinder that is not drawn in the animation. This smaller cylinder beats the straw as it leaves the main cylinder and concave to knock off any heads of grain that happen to remain on the stalk.
The Winnowing Process
The grain in the grain pan is now ready for winnowing. The grain pan has a corrugated bottom and vibrates around 215 beats per minute. This action helps to separate the husks or chaff from the grain and moves the grain to the rear of the pan where it can fall onto the sieve below. The sieve is similar to the grain pan except that it has holes in it that are just large enough for the grain to fall through. The size of the holes in the sieve are adjustable to accommodate different types of grain.
A fan is also placed below the grain pan and sieve and blows air up through the underside of the sieve. This wind will pick up the chaff and blow it to the rear of the separator where it can be blown out the windstacker with the straw.
When the clean grain drops through the sieve it is collected and funneled into an elevator where it is lifted to a small hopper before being dumped into a sack. This elevator works by running a long chain with paddles attached through a vertical chute.
Even after all this there are still some heads of grain that gets through the equipment in need of threshing and winnowing again. Rather than waste this grain, it is collected as it falls off the end of the sieve, funneled into a second elevator and dumped back into the cylinder and concave for a second go around.
Threshing Wheat with a Separator
When everything is ready it's time to go to work.
The whistle was used to announce that the separator was ready to go.
The engineer would also blow the whistle when he was running low on water. And a continuous series of short blasts from the whistle was a sound no one wanted to hear, it was the distress signal.
The wheat feeder. This was an attachment that made threshing wheat much faster and much safer. Without this attachment each bundle of wheat had to be cut open and the wheat fed directly into the cylinder. The feeder cuts the twine and chops up the wheat some so the cylinder won't get clogged up.
The feeder was an accessory and a relatively new invention. Older separators did not have this feature. This required someone to cut the twine holding the bundles of wheat together and feed the wheat directly into the cylinder.
The grain sacker was another accessory. Nowadays grain is dumped into a truck or trailer and taken to market. Years ago it had to be sacked into one bushel sacks. That created another job for two people which is not reenacted here.
The grain sacker collects the grain in a small hopper as it comes out of the separator. When a half bushel of wheat has accumulated in the hopper it tips and dumps the wheat down a chute to fill an empty sack. Then the sack was tied and loaded on a truck.
Prior to this invention the wheat came out and was measured in bushel baskets before being sacked.
Each threshing crew would have someone who stayed with the separator throughout the day. This person was responsible for making sure the equipment was in top shape and doing a good job for the conditions of the wheat. For Paul Swann that man was his uncle, Tarver Durrett.
He was good. I'd always said he had a mechanical ear. He could tell when a belt was slipping. He was just…he was a good mechanic. You couldn't beat him. He could tell when a belt was slipping by the different sound of the hum of the machine. Well, I could might near do that. But uh, you've just got to have your mind on what you're doing.
[There's] A lot of things in the separator. You've got to keep a certain RPM. You've got to keep your concaves on the conditions of the wheat where you adjust your concaves up and down you know to check the grain that goes through it to keep it from blowing over in the hay stack. You don't want that.
And there's a lot of times it's got these little old white caps that the cylinder don't get out and it goes back and hits the cyclone fan [and] it throws it in the straw stack. You've got to watch that. And you open your sieves where it takes care of them things, and it elevates it and goes back through the cylinder, you see, and rethreshes it and keeps it from blowing over.
There's a lot of wheat wasted in these combines. You see it coming up all over the ground behind it. And there ain't no need of it.
—Paul Swann
