The 29th Huron Pioneer Thresher Reunion, 1990-09-05, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1990. PAGE A-5.
Threshing gang ‘a lot more fun than work.’
Harold Gross was witness to the decline
of threshing in Huron county, a decline
that ended a way of life as much as it did a
way of harvesting. Mr. Gross operated one
of the last threshing gangs in the county
operating along Huron County Road 25
between Blyth and Auburn for nearly 20
years.
Mr. Gross got into the threshing
business in a round about way. In 1947 he
got married and he and his wife Bernice
bought a farm next door to his father’s
farm. With the farm came a threshing
machine and with the machine came nearly
two decades of working with neighbours.
Until the mid-1960's when combines
took over more and more of the harvesting,
Mr. Gross went from one farm to another
along the road threshing. He ran the
separator and his brother Carman was in
charge of the tractor. The huge steam
engines that are stars of the show at the
Thresher Reunion were a thing of the past
by then although Mr. Gross remembers a
steam engine run by Alec Wells coming to
his father’s farm when he was young and
later Ben Johnston used an Oil Pull tractor
to run the thresher.
Horses were still in use to pull the
wagons in the field while the sheaves were
loaded, he recalls. Each farm was to
provide two men and a team of horses and
they’d exchange work with about five
farms. Mr. Gross’ machine was pretty big,
he recalls, and it could keep five teams
going hard to keep up with it. Generally it
would take only a day or a day and a half to
finish the threshing at each farm. In those
days farmers didn’t have as much cash
crop with much of the farm devoted to hay
and pasture.
When he started out the charge to the
farmer was $5 or $5.50 an acre, he recalls
and by the end of his years with the gang it
had reached the princely sum of $7 an acre.
It meant a farmer would pay $30-$35 to
have his entire crop taken off, not including
his own time. “There’s still one guy that
i-armers traaea labour back and forth during threshing time, time provided more fun than work, Harold Gross remembers,
each farm providing a team of horses and two men. Threshing helping pull neighbours together.
hasn’t paid me yet,” he chuckles, figuring
if he could have the original charge plus
the accumulated interest he might have
something.
And not including the food served.
While the men were busy in the field,
women were busy preparing the meals to
quench the huge appetites the hard work
brought on. “We had some great home-
cooked meals,” he recalls, “and lots of
pies”. The farm wife whose turn it was to
host the threshing gang often got help from
her immediate neighbours and in return
helped them when it was their turn.
There was more fun than work involved
in threshing, he recalls. “It just seemed
like threshing time was a time to get
farmers together. I don’t say we’re still not
friends but we don’t get together so
much.”
He never recalls having a major break
down in all his years running the gang. The
weather too seemed to co-operate more as
he remembers.
He started out using a Case LA tractor to
power the machine but in 1954 bought a
Case D Diesel 500 series, a tractor that had
only come out a year earlier. It cost him
$4,600. He used the tractor until threshing
petered out and he traded it in, only to go
searching for it 15 years later so he could
restore it.
The neighbours got together to thresh
until the 1960’s when combines began to
take over the job and a tradition died.
With it died another tradition. The last day
of threshing it was the tradition for Mr.
Gross to buy a case of beer for the crew. “If
I didn’t have it I caught hell,” he chuckles.
“We had a lot more fun that we had
work.”
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