THROUGH
MOUNTAIN MISTS
Early Settlers of
Their
Descendants...Their Stories...Their Achievements
Lifting the
Mists of History on Their Way of Life
By: Ethelene Dyer Jones
Threshing time was important on
our farm in
Union County, Georgia during my growing-up days. I
have two distinct memories of how we went
about doing this task when the grain was cut, shocked to dry, and
hauled to the
barn awaiting the threshing.
If our crop was small, not much
planted in
either wheat or rye, we did threshing in the old-fashioned way,
flailing the
grain.
This was accomplished by
spreading a canvas
sheet on the ground and placing grain on it.
Then, with another sheet over the grain, we took sticks and beat
out the
seeds, a process we called flailing.
Before we put another supply of grain on the sheet to be
flailed, the
grain we had beaten out had to be separated from the straw and scooped
up into
containers for winnowing later. This
process of beating a small amount at the time went on until our whole
crop of
wheat or rye was separated from the seed pods.
The winnowing, or getting the chaff
out of the grain, was done by holding the bucket or other container at
shoulder
level on a day with a little breeze so the chaff would blow out of the
grain as
it fell from shoulder-level onto the winnowing cloth.
All of this process was tedious and took much
handling of the grain by hand. The grain
was forced into a pile at the center of the cloth.
Then it was pick up after the winnowing and
stored in containers or special grain bins in the barn.
Then the threshing machine came to our
community, and farmers grew larger fields of grain because the process
of
getting the grain from the pods was less time-consuming.
My grandfather, Francis Jasper Collins, whom
all the community—and even the county, for he had been a representative
to the
Georgia Legislature in earlier years—was the first in Choestoe to get a
threshing
machine. He purchased the machine even
before I was born, but in my childhood, I can remember “the threshers”
coming. At first, I have been told, and
an old faded photograph shows this, Grandpa pulled his threshing
machine with a
steer team, and somehow had it hooked up so that the animals provided
the power
to operate the machine, with necessary pulleys and belts.
Later he purchased a gasoline-powered
tractor with huge steel wheels. This
became the means of his pulling the threshing machine from farm to farm
and
also provided the power necessary to operate the thresher.
The threshing team made stops at the farms on
the circuit that had grain to be threshed.
It was a sort of carnival day at our farm when all the threshing
gear
and the workers arrived. My mother and
the neighborhood women—for they helped each other—depending on which
farm was
on schedule for the day’s work—fed the workers a great spread of food
at the
noon meal which we called dinner then.
I can remember the noise of the
tractor’s operation and the threshing machine’s “putt-putt” forcing the
grain
from the pods and sending it down a chute to be collected in bushel
measures. I was fascinated to see the
straw blown out of the chute and stacking up.
One worker with a pitchfork moved it to a growing pile to the
side of
the machine.
After the excitement of the day, the
hard work but party-like atmosphere, and the enjoyable “threshing day”
meal, we
had work to do after the threshing machine moved on to its next
location. Always after the fresh straw had
been stacked
up, we filled the freshly-washed bed ticks (straw mattresses) with the
newly-threshed, sweet-smelling straw. On
top of this straw mattress, our beds also had feather beds, another
mattress
filled with duck down. If we had
allergies to fresh straw and duck feathers in those days, we never gave
those
maladies a thought.
Until the wheat and rye were used up,
shortly before the next year’s harvest, we enjoyed breads made from
home grown
grains that had been ground into the respective flour at Souther mill,
about a mile
from our farm.
Remembering the practices on the farm
of my childhood days, they all seem like a world removed from our
present age
of “store-bought” goods and prepared and preserved foods.
Life in those days was filled with much hard
work and a savvy for neighbor helping neighbor.
“One good turn deserves another” was a well-practiced adage in
our
community as I grew up. The imagined
sounds of the old steel-wheeled tractor chugging up the road and the
operation
of the threshing machine settled for the happy work day on our farm
still
produce music to my ears.
[Ethelene Dyer
Jones is a retired educator,
freelance writer, poet, and historian. She may be reached at
e-mail edj0513@windstream.net;
phone 478-453-8751; or mail 1708 Cedarwood Road, Milledgeville, GA
31061-2411.]
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