Photo courtesy Roberta Porter Brennan
The Amish Heritage Center’s Threshing event west of Chesterville is August 3-4. Above Glendon Herschberger shocks oats for drying prior to threshing.

•July 25, 2018•

The second annual Steam Threshing Show will be held August 3-4 at the new Illinois Amish Heritage Center three miles east of Arthur. Times will be 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. on Friday and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday.
The 2018 show will be centered around harvesting and threshing oats rather than wheat. The oats will be cut and bound into sheaves by a horse-drawn mechanical binder two weeks before the event after which the sheaves will be stacked into shocks for drying in the field. On the day of the event, they will be loaded onto horse-drawn wagons and transported to the threshing machine which will separate the grain from the chaff and straw. The grain will be directed to a bin, and the straw will form a hay stack that will continually grow with each new round of threshing.
The threshing process will be done using antique farming equipment including a 1924 steam tractor and threshing machine made by the Keck-Gonnerman Company of Mt. Vernon, Indiana. Other antique and vintage agricultural equipment will also be on display, including a 1954 Massey Harris model 44 tractor owned by Sam Miller, a 1931 John Deere D owned by George Kauffman, and many other antique tractors. Farm equipment demonstrations will feature a John Deere stationary hay baler, old engines and steam engines, a grist mill, field demonstrations of plowing and disking, with Belgian horses and the old methods of threshing grain by hand with flails and a fanning mill. Blacksmithing will also be demonstrated as well as goat milking and butter churning. All demonstrations will be “learn abouts” as they will be accompanied by explanations of the processes.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.