The Welk Homestead State Historic Site, near Strasburg, is known to the public mainly as it commemorates the origins and career of Lawrence Welk. It also is committed to interpreting German-Russian culture and pioneer agriculture, because Lawrence’s parents, Ludwig and Christina, were Germans from Russia who proved up a homestead alongside Lake Baumgartner.
My involvement in this: I serve on the board of the Friends of the Welk Homestead, the public support group for the state historic site. As does Senator Robert Erbele, who himself takes pride in his German-Russian and agricultural heritage. Robert had the idea of showcasing the essential agricultural implements of wheat farming in the era of the Welk Homestead. This is how I have come to assemble a working group to identify the four essential implements of small-grain agriculture in the region during the first couple of decades of the twentieth century.
Identifying four essential implements was pretty easy, mainly because my broad research on the harvesting and threshing of small grains has involved a lot of time perusing old agricultural periodicals. The four items are the following.
- A plow, of course. For this era, not a walking plow, but a sulky plow, meaning it had a seat on it. If it had more than one bottom, or share, it was called a gang plow.
- A disc harrow, to bust clods, kill weeds, and prepare ground for seeding.
- A press drill, commonly of the disc type. Earliest crops on homesteads often were broadcast, the seed scattered by hand in biblical style, but drilling produced more consistent stands.
- A binder, for harvesting. Some farmers also used headers, which clipped off loose heads of ripe grain.
What about grain separators, threshing machines, the center of so much rural enterprise? Well, they were generally owned by threshermen, who did grain threshing on a custom basis. Few family farmers owned grain separators. And besides, threshing machines, along with the great steam engines that powered them, already are well and truly exhibited at the threshing grounds over in Braddock.
Steam was essential power for agriculture of the day, but it was brought in on a custom basis. Family farmers relied day to day on horse power and were just beginning the transition to tractor power.
This is a wonderful little piece of research to tackle. A key documentary source is the Emmons County Record, digitized and available from the Library of Congress. My initial search of the Emmons County Record discloses a particular kind of document that will anchor our documentation of historic agricultural implements: farm sale notices. Auctioneers published notices of auction sales, and the notices incorporated detailed lists of the goods on offer.
It’s easy to get sidetracked in this kind of research. These auction lists constitute a catalog of the material stuff of agriculture and rural life, including the age and weight of every single horse, means of transportation from spring wagons to bobsleds, household goods like mattresses and kitchen chairs. With these lists, you can imagine rather fully the everyday life of farm folk a century ago. And of course, every auction sale offers lunch for all in attendance.
Before we are done, I see this research going archeological, to examine and document old machinery and junk parts piled into shelterbelts and rockpiles, letting the material objects tell their story. They have much to tell us, if you know the language.
~Tom Isern
