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- [Madison] Capital Times, September 6, 2007
- by John Oncken
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The sun was beating down incessantly: The temperature was approaching the 90 degree mark.
Dust, smelled but unseen, was in the air. The film was visible on the shiny, antique garden tractors on display.
A cloud of black smoke hung over an array of old steam engines. Folks were brushing it out of their eyes and occasionally a hacking cough was heard.
It was a perfect day for the 51st annual reunion of the Rock River Thresheree. The parking lots were full, and people were walking or riding to the site in wagons pulled by tractors of another era.
Thousands of folks made their way over the Labor Day weekend to the farm field along U.S. 51 just south of Edgerton.
They were there to relive the past or look with wonder at the huge machines that worked the land and powered factories back in the days before computers, cell phones, TV, radio and even electricity.
Steam engines powered by straw, wood and coal are always a center of attraction. It's hard to imagine that these behemoths -- spouting steam and belching black smoke -- pulled the plows that broke the Midwest soils that became the "breadbasket" of the world and now are the corn belt and soybean farms we see daily.
After 150 years, maybe more, the steam engines are still running under the tender loving care of 90-year-old men and 9-year-old boys who are proud of their ability to turn a wrench, feed coal and accumulate a covering of black coal dust on their faces and overalls.
Oh, the stories that are told! How the rust was removed from a long idle Case or Port Huron steamer. How it passed from family to family over the years and how the puzzle of fixing and replacing is always solved. It's not by taking the machine to a repair shop but by making the part needed or searching the newspapers, Internet or human word of mouth highway to find one in someone's old barn.
The evolution of gasoline and diesel tractors is there to follow, from the bulky, slow, loud and very awkward tractors of the first half of the 20th century to the sleeker and more colorful tractors of the 1940s and 1950s.
Then there's the lineup of threshing machines that over the course of the day will perform for the crowd. And perform is the proper word, as these huge machines have sat idle for decades (except for a few that still serve some Amish communities) and are set in motion for brief periods at antique farm shows like the Thresheree.
People have fond memories of those long ago days when threshing was hard, dirty work and a source of pride and bragging rights. People remember those days with a sense of awe at how those rumbling machines worked, marveling that oats bundles would go in one end and come out as grain and straw while being powered by a long belt leading to an ancient tractor.
At the Rock River Thresheree, hundreds of tractors are lined up, sort of, by make. Small clusters of men wearing bib overalls, straw hats or engineer caps are talking. Not about the Packers, Brewers or Badgers, but about seats, steering wheels, tires and pistons. Or perhaps they're talking about bringing an old F-20 to the Thresheree next year. It might need a lot of work, but they can't wait to get at it.
A new building on the site is being filled by Jim Faith with machine tools used from 1880 to 1930. It will be a working building.
The many drill presses and such will be hooked up to a line shaft that spent many years in the Fairbanks Morse factory in Beloit.
The whole thing will be powered by a steam engine made in 1923 (in that Beloit factory by that same line shaft). The steam engine spent its life in an Alabama cotton gin.
Faith, owner of Faith Engineering in Monroe, searched 10 years for such an engine and found it a few years ago. Layers of rust were removed and the clutch was unfrozen before the engine was installed in the Thresheree building.
Faith's firm makes exotic and complicated machinery for the food and dairy industry. His new invention is a robot-controlled system that will cut a block of cheese into exact weights. He is currently working on a project with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"I live in today's modern world but also in the 'old world,''' Faith says. "I love it."
He comes by his love of old machinery naturally. His dad, Bob Faith, has been a member of the Rock County Thresheree for decades. "I'm number 146," he says.
Bob Faith began hauling milk at age 16 in 1960 during the changeover from can to bulk milk. Now he's a collector of old machinery and his 1935 Caterpillar 40 was on display at the show.
"I bought it in the early 1980s,'' Bob says, adding that Cadiz township in Green County bought the crawler in 1935 to plow snow from rural roads. "It didn't have a cab at first, but they installed one fast after a couple days of snow plowing."
The machine was used for many years but retired in the 1950s or '60s except for a heavy snow winter in the 1970s when it was prepared for use but was never fired up.
A friend convinced Bob to bring the old crawler to the Thresheree, and it started rather easily.
"And it's going to be on display at Wisconsin Technology Days in Green County Sept. 18-20," said Bob's wife Nancy, who serves on the Technology Days executive committee.
While the old "Cat" is long retired, it's a reminder of the days when rural roads weren't opened for several days or even weeks after a big snow.
There was a young woman in the seat of a 1941 John Deere H. There was no one else within a couple hundred yards.
"I'm enjoying the day," Jennifer Johnson, 17, said. "I don't know much about old tractors, but I really like them. My grandfather, Harold Maurerman of Evansville, my mother's father, was one of the original members of the Thresheree and my parents Jay and Jeanne Johnson own this tractor.''
Jennifer is a senior at Janesville Parker High School who plans to join the Navy after graduation, then become a mortician. She also said she had taken ballet lessons most of her life.
But tractors? "I'm sure the 1,800 kids at Parker High don't know I like tractors,'' she says. "But I'm in my element here.
You don't need a reason to enjoy displays of historic farm equipment. But the folks who flood the Thresheree grounds and other shows like it certainly have their reasons. Perhaps it has something to do with high technology of a different era and the wonder of how such big equipment was invented, built and used, without computers and today's high-tech science.
Surprise, people were smart even then.
