There is an old J.I. Case steam-driven threshing machine along a fence line northwest of our house. I can remember playing on and in it as a child when my family would drive up from Des Moines to visit family here. A horse-drawn haystacker stands nearby; its parallel chains drooping. I've always felt that there's something unique about this area of northwest Minnesota, where the forests end and the prairie begins, in as much as during my lifetime there was still so many 'farm ruins,' as my daughter calls ancient horse-drawn and steam-powered farm equipment, to be seen across the landscape here in Roseau County. [To Be Continued.]
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These need to be mounted, framed, and shown in a gallery. Striking lines, patterns, colors, textures. Yay.
ReplyDeleteYou know...when I was young these machines were already old...but they looked like futuristic dinosaurs from outer space to me.
ReplyDeleteMy great-grandfather Louis Palm's 1895 homestead was between Joe's place and ours until very recently; the new landowner bulldozed it I'm told. Built with dove-tailed cornered cedar logs in about 1900, and sided with material cut with their sawmill; its handmade cedar shakes were later covered with corrugated-galvanized steel roofing to further protect it from the elements; intact glass-paned windows did the rest. In front of the 2-story house, stood a horse-drawn caboose on bob-sled runners which they used in the wintertime. On a river bank there, well beyond the water, stood a wooden threshing machine, I think it had been built in Iowa; the precursor of this all-steel version, on wooden wagon wheels. I think I still have photographs of it 'somewhere.' The thing is this part of Minnesota was homesteaded last, as I recall. Minnesota became a state in 1858; Iowa in 1846, if I'm not mistaken. But Minnesota's statehood didn't include the northern half where we are; this was still relatively uninhabited by 'immigrants' until about 1863, then 1899 as treaties with the Anishinaabeg indicate. That sort of explains why visages of log cabins, gigantic horse barns, Conestoga wagon-type wagon wheels just under the sod in the woods -- and Louis & Inga's log home were still around a hundred years later in remarkable shape or still exist at all.
ReplyDeleteThis threshing machine and others just like it come alive at the Western Minnesota Steam Show in Rollag, Minnesota over Labor Day; that $40 admission is well worth a day of living history.
put it on the list for our next trip out
DeleteThis post reminds me of my own exploits in and around a two-passenger (instructor and student) WWII flight training plane - if my memory serves, an AT6. Airfields across the country were the final home landings for these old war horses.
ReplyDeleteLikewise old artillery pieces like the 60-lb British howitzer in the Lake Preston SD, City Park, which was featured in a Sven & Ula segment titled "Under Pressure," hitherto be republished, once again in either the Wannnaskan Almanac or Wannaskawriter https://palmvilletownshipmn.blogspot.com/ just because we need a little art & humor in our lives about now, depending on your viewpoint.
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