Near the end of The Little House in the Big Woods Laura Ingalls Wilder recalls how her Pa and Uncle Henry cut and threshed their wheat. The wheat separator in her story was powered by eight horses hitched to a switch. These horses spent their day walking in a circle to provide power to the separator. The steam engine was the first machine to replace livestock as a source of power for the farmer and it brought farming to a whole new level.
See still images taken from this part of the film!
Steam Power
The steam engine was the first portable, mechanical power source available to farmers. The earliest models appeared on the market a few years after the American Civil War, but it wasn't until the 1880s that the first self-propelled engines were produced. These were immediately popular.
Steam engines create power by releasing the chemical energy stored in fuels like coal or wood and converting it to the mechanical energy needed to run equipment like a thresher or a sawmill.
This is easy to understand by looking at how all the parts work together.
The Parts of a Steam Engine
The largest part of an engine is the boiler. It is the cylindrical tank that is the midsection of the machine and is where water is heated to make steam.
The fuel that is used to heat the water is burned in the firebox which is mounted on the rear of the boiler.
The floor of the firebox is a grate. This allows the ashes to fall into the ash pan below. The ash pan door is called the damper and it can be opened and closed to regulate the air flow into the firebox. This is how the engineer controls the amount of heat the fire produces.
The cylindrical sides of the boiler extend past the boiler's front wall. This area is called the smoke box. The smoke stack rises from the top of the smoke box.
The smoke travels from the firebox to the smoke box through tubes that run the length of the boiler. These tubes are called "flues." This increases the heating efficiency of the engine.
A steam dome is built on top of the boiler. Steam collects here and is tapped for powering the steam cylinder. A safety valve is also mounted here to prevent steam pressure from building up to a dangerous level.
The Steam Cylinder
The steam cylinder is where all the mechanical action takes place. It is usually mounted on top of the boiler and a valve chest is built onto the side of it. Two steam ports connect the valve chest to either end of the cylinder.
Steam is piped from the steam dome and passes through the throttle valve before entering the cylinder. Steam enters and leaves the cylinder through the valve chest.
Once in the cylinder the steam pushes the piston back and forth. The valve also moves back and forth to route the incoming steam to one side of the piston while allowing exhaust steam to exit from the other side of the piston.
Steam engines provide a very smooth power. This is because steam is being used to push the piston each time it makes a stroke in the cylinder.
The exhaust steam is piped to the base of the smoke stack and vented up the stack with the smoke. This helps to create more air flow through the firebox and flues so the fire will produce more heat.
Harnessing Steam Power
Outside the cylinder the reciprocating motion of the piston is used to turn the drive wheel or pulley. The rods that connect the piston to the drive wheel's shaft causes the wheel to rotate. This is similar to a bicyclist pumping the pedals of a bike to move forward.
A belt is looped around the drive wheels of the engine and a piece of equipment, like a thresher, to run the equipment just like a bicycle chain connects the pedal gear to the rear wheel to turn the wheel.
Propulsion
The rear wheel of a steam engine is also connected through a simple transmission and clutch so it can move under its own power. Steam engines only have two gears: forward and reverse.
I never will forget driving that engine home. [Another engine, not Kay-Gee 1875.] It was the last engine the Case people ever made and I don't know what date it was, well it was nineteen and thirty-seven when we brought it home. I don't know when it was made but anyway they shipped it to Nashville on a barge, unloaded it down there at that old wharf building at the end of Broad.
Me and Tarver [Durrett] went over there and pulled it out of that building with a truck and pulled it up to First Street there behind the J. I. Case building on First Street, put water in it, built a fire in it, greased it, and got it ready to come home. And coming up First Street I got the front wheels stuck in the streetcar tracks and couldn't get it out. I had to get two iron wedges and pull up there to get it out and I finally got it out.
Come on across the Woodland Street Bridge. Come on to Goodlettsville the first night, and we left it in Goodlettsville. Four miles an hour was as fast as it would go and it took me two days to bring it home from Nashville. And I started steaming plant beds when I came off 31-W and steamed plant beds all the way home.
— Paul Swann
Operating a Steam Engine
Well, it takes about an hour in the morning to get the steam up. And after you get the steam up you've got to keep the steam up and under pressure when your working with a heavy load. You've got to take into consideration your water, and your coal or wood (if you're burning coal or wood), your damper on the bottom, and you've just got to watch everything. If your steam pressure goes down you've got to put more fuel to it. If it gets up and starts getting ready to pop off you've got to put more water to it and close your damper. And it's just a matter of kind of like juggling rocks and keeping the hottest one in the air all the time.
Everybody is not suited for it because some people are liable to forget one thing or forget the other thing and that's what makes one of these things so dangerous. If you get the water down below the crown sheet it's going to blow up, so you've got to make sure you've got water in the sight glass all the time.The engine basically is not really that hazardous if you've got a good operator on it. I've never seen one blow up. I've seen this one and several more spring leaks and spew, but you've got time to get your fire out and get it cooled off.
It wasn't this engine, it was another engine that they bought new that I remember him telling me the deal about they drove it from Nashville to Cross Plains. And when they got up around White House they started steaming plant beds and it took them about two months to get the engine home.
They got it home and put it up and they started threshing with it the next summer and he never did check the plug in the front of the boiler. When it came from the factory they screwed it in hand tight. The plug blew out of the front of the boiler, went all the way to the separator. It was just fortunate nobody was standing in front of it. But little things like that can happen to you.
—Jackie Swann
A lot of places back long time ago they furnished the fuel for the engine. And a lot of the times they'd just put poles out there and you'd have to chop up the wood to fire the engine. Wasn't no end to it.
And at the sawmill we used slabs to fire the engine at the mill. We had to chop them in two and split it up and put it in the engine to fire it to pull the saw. We never did use coal at the sawmill, used slabs.
I rigged up a cutoff saw behind the engine that come off the flywheel. Put another pulley on it that pulled the saw and all he had to do was cut his wood and get ready to put it in the engine.
Made an elevator and what wood that you didn't use at the engine you'd saw it up into stove length and it would pile up outside.
Charlie [Bumpus], I think is about as good a boy as I ever tried to learn on a engine. He got a hold of it pretty quick and he's pretty watchful and he takes care of that engine. He does a good job.
Other words, the first thing you've got to have in your mind is that you like it. You've got to like your work. And I enjoyed fooling with engines and tractors. I enjoyed farming.
—Paul Swann
Uses for a Steam Engine
Will and Caner Swann used their steam engines for three different jobs on their farms: steaming tobacco plant beds, running a sawmill, and threshing wheat. And once they had finished their own work, they would do custom work for farmers who didn't own a steam engine.
Steaming Tobacco Plant Beds
Tobacco has always been one of Robertson County's main cash crops. Tobacco seeds are sown in plant beds early in the spring and the young plants are transplanted to the field after a few weeks of growth.
Farmers would prepare ground for their plant beds in the late fall or early spring. This involved plowing a 12 foot by 75 foot [3.66 m x 22.86 m] strip of ground for each plant bed to be sown and using some method to kill the weed seeds that were in the ground. That's where the steam engine came in for many farmers.
[They] had a big pan that was about foot deep. And it was the width of a plant bed which was about twelve by twelve [31 cm x 366 cm x 366 cm]. It had handles on each corner. And you'd work your ground up and put this pan down on it and take a pipe from the steam dome and stick under the pan and take a hoe and hoe [the dirt] up around the pan. And they'd turn the steam on for approximately twelve to fifteen minutes underneath this pan. And that would kill all the seed and everything in the ground. Then they'd have four men there, one on each corner, and they'd pick the pan up and go and set it down again and just keep on doing that.
He steamed plant beds for the public too.— Jackie Swann
The Sawmill
Well, actually most of the mill work they did was custom work. The farmers around there, if they wanted to build a barn or a house or something, they'd cut their own timber and bring it to the mill. And they would saw their lumber for so much a foot. Now, I don't know how much a foot they got for it.
Basically, that's how they…they never really was in the lumber business per se, they just did custom work for all the farmers in the area.— Jackie Swann
Threshing Wheat
Wheat threshing was probably the biggest reason a farmer in Middle Tennessee would have purchased a steam engine.
A steam engine and separator allowed a farmer to raise more grain and still be able to harvest his crop in a reasonable amount of time. Even with this equipment, harvest time was a busy time and a community effort.
