Glimpsing the Past In Pine Village, Indiana
(Page 4 of 5)
January/February 1998
Dr. Robert T. Rhode
The ring closest to the northwest edge of Pine Village was known
as 'the bucket run.' (The accompanying box preserves the
names of bucket-run members.) The threshers carried their dinner in
a bucket instead of following the custom of sitting down to a
lavish meal prepared by the wives of farmers on the ring. The
bucket run used basket racks on the bundle wagons and had no
pitchers in the field; instead, the bundle haulers walked beside
the wagons and tossed bundles into the basket. The sills on the
wagons extended rearward farther than normal and held two feed
boxes on the back corners. Bucket-run horses did not to the ground,
destroying one of the Rumely rigs. Fred never threshed again after
that. Jay Max sold his Advance engine to a junk dealer who cut it
up for scrap. I think of that engine when I turn to the same recipe
which Elva Conrad, Max's housekeeper, and her daughter Elsie
(later married to Milton Dowden) followed when they baked sour-milk
drop cookies for Max's threshing crew in the 1920s.
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A Worthington Ingersol Rand cooler engine.''...
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According to my father, one of the last new engines to enter
Warren County was a Keck-Gonnerman which the Fleming family south
of West Lebanon bought. It threshed for four years, sat unused for
eight or nine years, then was scrapped during World War II. The
epoch of the farm traction engine faded away.
In that era, so different from our own, the majority of children
saw both parents throughout the day and were well acquainted with
each parent's tasks. In our metropolitan present, sensible
people keep their jobs and their lives separate, but, for farm
families back then, the home life embraced work in barn and field.
At threshing time, farmers beheld the product of their labor. By
contrast, much of our work may seem meaningless because we
contribute only a preliminary step in a process and seldom or never
view the result. Similarly, downsizing and 'bottom-line'
economics have banished the old-fashioned virtue of loyalty to a
job and to one another. A significant but gradual cultural shift
which began to occur in the late 1800s took place in the way
personalities developed. Earlier, society prized individual
expression, even to the extent of accepting eccentricities. Within
reason, fresh traits and quirks of character provided sources of
entertainment. Later, society emphasized a greater degree of
conformity. This change accompanied the transition from a rural to
an urban America. Anyone who remembers a relative from the late
1800s who had an inimitable personality can sense the magnitude of
this cultural transformation.
The most noteworthy change in rural society occurred when small
gasoline-powered tractors and one-man combines enabled each farmer
to return to the pre-thresher tradition of working independently.
The threshing machine had brought farmers together, but the combine
drove them apart again. Ambivalence toward collaboration and
independence characterizes the history of agriculture. This
uncertainty reminds me of a traveler who asked a farmer which of
two roads was the better way to town. 'Take either
one,'' said the farmer, ' and, before you get halfway,
you'll wish you'd tuck t' other.'
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