By Benny Phillips, July 2009

• Introduction
• When Threshing Was A Community Event
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When Threshing Was a Community Event

Telephones in rural North Carolina were few at the time, so it was by word of mouth that farmers knew almost to the day when the threshing machine would be in their neighborhood. It was a community happening in June, July and sometimes into August, matched only by corn shuckings in autumn.

Threshing machines and their crews traveled from farm to farm, separating wheat and oats grain from the straw.

Wheat and oats harvested by a reaper produced bundles of grain called shocks that people stacked in the field, 15 to 20 shocks in a circle with more stacked on top providing a straw roof. At one time, teams of mules pulled the reapers. Later, tractors—some powered by steam—pulled reapers through fields of grain. Then gas-powered tractors pulled the reapers and finally the self-propelled combine replaced both.

Putting wheat and oats in shocks and leaving them stacked in the field was a means of drying the grain.

Once dried—and wheat usually dried quicker than oats—farmers hauled the shocks to the barn on wagons to await the threshing machine, although there were occasions when the threshing machine operated in the field.

It took a crowd to get the grain threshed. You helped your neighbors, and your neighbors helped you. All the women in the neighborhood came to wherever the threshing was going on and began preparing lunch at the same time the men would go to work. The men stopped at lunch and ate a meal that would compare to anyone’s Christmas dinner, then later stretched out under shade trees in the front yard to sleep off their lunch.

Each spring when school ended, I worked summers at my father’s homeplace. My two uncles ran the farm, and my grandmother did a lot of the wonderful cooking. My first job after the school year was to clean the inside of the big barn. I had to prepare for shocks of wheat and oats from the fields.

I still remember the smell of the tack room, the neat’s-foot oil, and the coiled long-reach reins hanging from wooden pegs on the left wall. The leather punches and brass rivets in jars stayed pigeonholed along the work bench. From the forward wall, a bleached calendar a yard long showed a girl on a hay bale smiling straight at me when I entered the room. I watched through my boyhood years for her shirt’s bottom button to pop loose. It never did. Below the young lady it said: 19 Louisville Roller Mill 41.

Then one afternoon the big old tractor pulling the big old threshing machine would come huffing and puffing down the dirt road. All the men with the machine wore red bandannas to keep chaff from going down their shirts. They began to prepare the machine and tractor for the work that would begin the next morning. The man who owned the outfit would go straight behind the barn and make conversation with the mules and horses. The animals seemed to understand. He would give each a lump of sugar. I guess he was a relic from the time when men ranked men by the way they handled animals. The man charged by how many bushels of grain he threshed.

Soon my uncles bought a combine, one of those you pulled with a tractor. The big ones had not come along yet. The threshing machine never returned to our place.

—Benny Phillips