Qa of reaching the barn intact. I filled the post of load builder, while my father or a hired man tossed the sheaves into the rack. WHERE | Threshing, which came next on the program of farm activities, was a community operation. About a half-dozen workers were required -- neighbors

who went from farm to farm under a long-established mutual assistance

".

arrangement. The threshing equipment -- "the rig" -- was owned and operated by local men who worked on a hire basis: a fee for-each job, depending on the time required. The rig had three components: the "horsepower," the thresher, and the cleaner. In earlier time, the cleaner was called the "shaker" -- a piece of gear resembling the cleaner in structure, but lacking the means of separating the wheat from ‘the chaff. With the introduction of a powerful blower, the shaker became the cleaner.

The horsepower was a two-horse treadmill that stood about twenty feet outside the big barn door. From a flywheel on its side, a heavy leather driving belt ran toa pulley on the thresher and thus supplied power to the thresher and the cleaner, which were also connected by a driving belt. The thresher, also called the "drum," was a box-like device, open at front and rear, that stood on four legs and had a chute at the front. Inside, on the bottom panel, there was an array of vertically-placed steel teeth, so arranged that a set of similar teeth on a rotating high-speed cylinder passed through their interstices. Sheaves fed down the chute were shredded by the action of the teeth; the grain was beaten from the stalks, and the -whole mass hurled out the rear of the thresher onto a transmission belt that carried it into the cleaner. Here the grain fell through a sieve, past the blower and into a spout that protruded from the side of the machine. The chaff was blown out the rear of the cleaner along with the straw, which was forked onto the loft for storing.

Getting underway in the morning sometimes included a demonstration by

one or both of the horses who, for some reason,hald a very low opinion of