[AT] More from Aunt Charlotte's book (Fanning mill)

[DAVIESW739 at aol.com]

Farmers helped each other with the threshing as well as the cutting of the 
grain and sometimes it was well into the winter before everyone's grain would be 
stored away in sacks or bins.A few days before threshing was to start, the 
farmers would round up there wild horses. When everything was ready at the farm 
where the work was to begin, forty or fifty of the wild horses would be driven 
there and corralled in a pen that opened to the threshing floor.

  Our threshing floor was not really a floor at all, but just a smooth, level 
bit of hard ground with a high wall around it. Gates opened from it to a 
couple of corrals. The wild horses were driven into one of these pens and kept 
there till the floor had been covered to a depth of three or four feet with the 
loose bundles of grain. Then fifteen or twenty of the horses would be driven 
onto it. They were exactly as wild as antelopes. The loose straw under foot and 
men and boys hollering and waving their hats, frightened the imprisoned 
animals into the wildest panic. Back and forth and round and round they would 
plunge. when their speed would slacken, men with long whips would urge them on and 
on till flakes of foam and sweat would drip from their flanks. Then they would 
be turned into the empty corral and men would go onto the threshing floor and 
turn the straw, or if the grain had been shattered easily, the straw would be 
thrown out and new bundles would be spread on the floor and fresh horses would 
be turned in. The threshing at each farm might last for a week or two. It was 
a wonderful time for us children. The men, themselves, seemed to enjoy it.

  And so the threshing would go on at each farm in its turn till it was all 
done. Then the herd of jaded and now thoroughly broken horses would be divided 
and taken home to be ridden or worked by their owners.

  But that did not finish the harvest. At our house there would be maybe a 
thousand bushels of grain on the threshing floor and as many bushels, or more of 
chaff and broken straw. Separating the grain from the chaff was a tedious 
task. It was usually done by the farmers themselves. A high platform would be 
built in a place well exposed to the wind. Sacks of the grain would be carried up 
to a man who stood on the platform, then he would pour it slowly into the 
sweep of the wind. The heavier grain falling neat and clean in a pile at the base 
of the platform, while the lighter straw and chaff, would scatter and carry 
away. The grain that was to be used for seed or flour would be run through the 
fanning mill. Oh! how I hated that fanning mill. I am not sure, but I think I 
would be afraid of it even yet. I used to have to keep the cleaned grain 
cleared away from the front of it and I would rather have faced wild horses. I do 
not really know why I was afraid of it, but I was. It stood in the granary and 
I never went there unless I was sent for something.Things were getting easier 
for us and Mother seemed quite happy and contented. It is true that there were 
not a great many people in the country even then, it was a time in November 
of 1847 that I have in mind, but several families that we liked and neighbored 
with were near us and told us of things that were happening in other parts of 
our new country. Our lives had settled into the new ways and we were contented 
and happy in a peaceful valley.

Walt Davies
Cooper Hollow Farm
Monmouth, OR 97361
503 623-0460