Glimpsing the Past In Pine Village, Indiana
(Page 2 of 5)
January/February 1998
Dr. Robert T. Rhode
We imagine the ringing blows of hammers in that blacksmith shop
of long ago. We envision a steam engineer watching intently while
Tommy repairs a broken part. When iron horses powered threshing
machines, Pine Village hosted the formation of a number of rings or
runs associations of farmers collaborating during the threshing
season (see 'A Hoosier Town and Her Engines' in the
November/December 1994 issue of The Iron-Men Album Magazine). The
company run northwest of Pine Village tended to thresh where the
straw could be blown into barns rather than threshing in the open
fields. East of Pine Village were farms more recently tiled and
drained. In general, the mows of the newer barns there were
smaller. When my great-uncle Charley Cobb ran a Reeves rig for Joe
Williams east of Pine Village, he was accustomed to setting
threshers and engine in the open, but when he substituted for Jake
Kiger, the engineer of the company run, Charley usually belted the
Huber to the thresher beside a barn so that the wind stacker could
fill the spacious mow with straw. (The accompanying box preserves
for posterity the names of members of William's threshing
ring.)
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Wooden staves covered by a thin metal skin formed the water tank
in front of the Huber's smoke box. The bottom edge of the tank
had rusted away in spots. My father, Joseph Curtis 'Joe'
Rhode, remembers a hot summer day of threshing at his grandfather
Joseph Thomas 'Tom' Cobb's tall barn in a low area
where eat inside farmers' barns but were fed from these boxes.
My father commented that, for men and horses, 'It must've
been the least pleasurable to work on the bucket run of any run
with which I was acquainted.' The bucket run hired Zack
Strickler as engineer for many years, but, on more than one
occasion, Jake St. John took a turn. Joe Williams and Charley Cobb
spent two successive years threshing the bucket run while others
filled in where Joe and Charley usually worked east of town.
Incidentally, around Pine Village, most farmers fed their straw
to livestock. The few who baled straw sold it to the Straw Board in
Lafayette where it was used to make cardboard boxes. Gas-powered
'Indiana' trucks with hard-rubber tires hauled loads of
straw from Pine Village to the Straw Board in late fall and early
winter. The Indiana Wagon Company of Lafayette built these
vehicles. The Straw Board accepted even damp straw, if it were
still yellow.
Each year, the threshing season officially ended on 'settle
up day' when the members of the threshing run would gather to
divide the profits according to pre-arranged agreements. Children
of the era regarded the occasion as a grand party embellished with
delicious ice cream. My father said that the company run's
settle-up days at George Hess's home were particularly
memorable. On chairs in the dappled blue shadows beneath the
hardwood trees sat the threshing men with their account books while
children concentrated on hide-and-seek in the yard and adolescents
played baseball in the pasture.
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