Farm Implements

We lived on Mill Hollow Drive in Moreland Hills, about 20 miles East of Cleveland Ohio. The house was a Cape Cod style, dormer windows for the upstair's tiny bedrooms. The house sat back from the road, gravel driveway, and a large willow tree just to the North of the driveway entrance. The back of the house had a screened in porch and we looked West to a line of tall trees on the ridge behind us. On the other side of the those trees was a field, and, as I remember from a time when I was 5 years old, it was planted in wheat.

On a hot and sunny summer's day, I remember  there was a red Farmall tractor with a cutting bar cutting the wheat. Behind that was another tractor pulling a wagon and men with pitchforks were heaving the wheat onto the wagon. When the wagon was full of wheat cuttings, it turned to the West and disappeared. I walked to the field to follow the wagon. In the distance I saw a dust cloud and a column of black smoke, and I heard what sounded like a steam locomotive. The field was surrounded by a block pattern steel fence so I had to first walk South along one side of the field and then, at the corner, head West. As I approached the dust and black smoke cloud I saw a wagon with a man on top of the wheat heap, he was pitching the wheat stalks into the upraised shoot of a wooden gray colored stand alone threshing machine. Connected by a half twisted belt was a steam tractor on gigantic iron wheels, single piston, tended by a man shoveling coal into its boiler; steam and black smoke coming from the chimney. The threshing machine whirled and crunched. At one side, a man with a burlap bag stood by a lever handled door and emptied wheat grains into the bag. Out the rear, a long pipe reached high into the air creating and ever increasing stack of straw along with a billowing cloud of dust.  I stood there watching the process: wheat stalks in, grain poured from the side door, and straw out the back. I stood there listening to the chug chug chugging of the steam tractor, the tap tap tapping of the eight inch wide leather connecting belt as it slapped together, and the whirling cacaphony of the thresher.

That's the way they use to do it, way back when.

My father told me about using a wooden snow plow, pulled behind horses on winter days; plowing Kinsman road, a brick reminant remained into my youth living in Daisy Hill, which had triggered my father's rememberence of his early days working as a farm hand. During the Spring, as the horses had not exercised much, being kept mostly in their stalls during the winter, my dad would walk behind the dirt plow, digging deep into the soil as the horses pulled mightily and with so much pent up energy.

Another farm rememberance was when I would visit my Grandparents who had a two story concrete block house, which Grandpa had built on the South side and just behind the sand dunes of Lake Erie. My family would sometimes stay for a week at the "lake". It was at one of those visits that I remember visiting Shimpsa's farm.

The farm was off a dirt road, which was off an intersecting dirt road onwhich my grandparents lived, which was off an intersecting dirt road "Countyline Road" near Geneva Ohio. Across the street from my grandparents solitary shore house, was a forest inwhich my grandfather hunted rabbits in the fall, and grandma would make Hossenfeffer, cream marrianated rabbit stew.  Shimpsa's farm was locate kitty-corner Southeast of the forest and on the East side of the dirt road. The driveway into the farm yard was flanked by a dust covered white house on the right, straight ahead was the chicken coop with ramps leading up to the chicken roost doorways, and on the left side was the red barn with black roof. Standing to the back corner of the barn was a round wooden silo. On the right side of the chicken coop was a wooden corn crib filled with yellow kernaled, red based corn cobs. Just in front of the corn crib as a round stone grinder; you put the corn cob into the top, and the grinder would grind off the corn kernals. One would then open a bottom door and retrive the corn. In a small kerchief, I collected the corn. Chickens would come up to me pecking at my little bag and me. Frightened, I dropped the little bag and the chickens pecked away at the freshly husked corn.

Rows upon rows of Concord grapes hung from wire fences, Eastward, right behind the chicken coop. We walked the rows of grapes with galvanized buckets and collected the grape clusters, sampling as we went.

At wheat harvest, there was a new "combine": reaper and thresher, spewing wheat shafts out the back. Behind the combine was a contraption which raked the wheat shafts into rows. Behind that was an automatic bailer, scooping up the rows of wheat shafts, and making 55 pound bails wraped in bailing twine. The tractor pulling the bailer also pulled the trailer where two men took the bails and stacked them high, eventually to be housed in the barn, above where the cattle were milked. Straw to sop up the urine and manure, which would be spun off the back of a manure wagon onto the fields later in the fall and winter.

Mr. Schimpsa had a grey Ford tractor with bright red steering arms. The black back tires had manure between the ribs. The seat, steel and multiple ventilation holes. The gas lever was silver and its pointer indicated which speed on a long ribbed indicator bar just on the otherside of the steering wheel.

Mr. Schimpsa was a wizzened man, gray haired and wearing bib overalls, knee high rubber boots and a red and white scarf around his neck. He showed us how to do things and left us alone as he had other things to do. We would climb up the hay and straw in his barn, high to the huen log rafters. Wide openings between the barn siding allowed us to see the Western sun, road, and forest. The galvanized tin roof above, was secured at 3 foot intervals to the rafters. There was a musty smell to the hay. Pigeons flew amongst the wooden beams.

These are some of my rememberances of the farm implements I had seen when I was a boy, as Kathy had recalled seeing yet older farm implements when we were at the Peacock tree farm this winter. I was harkening back to my experiences even as Kathy was relating her own.