Threshers Reunion gives look into farming’s past

By Thomas Nelson, tnelson@charlescitypress.com

The smell of diesel fuel and the sound of engines filled the air outside Rockford at the Cedar Valley Engine Club’s 52nd Threshers Reunion.

Around 500 people attended Saturday, Sept. 2, and experienced the antique tractors, threshers and other eclectic pieces of farm equipment, some more than a century old.

“The thresher machine threshes the oats out of bundles,” said Dick Neal, a member of the Cedar Valley Engine Club. “The thresher is a separator really.”

“There’s some old first self-propelled combines out here, our corns shellers (from) around 1920,” Neal said.

On the first day there were people from four different Midwestern states, Kentucky and all around Iowa, with a field full of cars.

Growing up on a farm around old tractors and machinery attracted Neal to collecting antique farm equipment, he said.

“I still have an acreage,” Neal said. “Keeping the old machinery going, like an antique car. Why do you want an antique car, instead of new car?”

All of the farm equipment at the reunion is rare, because after machines stop working many people will sell them for scrap, Neal said.

“If you’ve got a tractor made in 1922, there’s not too many of them around,” he said.

Some people enjoy the process of making old things work, said Cedar Valley Engine Club member Steve Montag, who owns a thresher that is a century old and still working.

Montag had his thresher working at the event in the field as onlookers stopped by and watched it pushed out grain that he had planted and harvested earlier this year.

“We’ll bail the straw a little later,” Montag said.

His thresher was built around 1917.

“I bought this machine last summer at another collectors auction,” Montag said. “The story was it had sat for 20 years in a shed and since it had been in a shed it had been in pretty good shape.”

Montag had to do a little work to get it running again.

“I’ve been a member of the club for 35 years,” Montag said. “When I first started I was an apprentice from the old guys that were around then, because I had never grew up around a threshing machine.”

Now he is a one of those old guys, Montag said.

“I like old machinery and the challenge of restoring it and making it run,” Montag said. “There’s a lot of satisfaction when you take a piece of machinery that hasn’t run for 20 years and you put it back together and it works.”

Montag’s favorite part of the event is running his old machines, he said.

“Doing the same job that the combines of today do, it’s just that there’s a little more labor involved with this old machine,” Montag said.

The event was held from Saturday, Sept. 2, to Monday, Sept. 4, on Labor Day weekend.

There were door prizes and musical entertainment in addition to a lot of antique farm equipment.

Linda McCann presented “What do you know about Prohibition in Iowa?” on Sunday, and told her audience the history of Al Capone in Iowa and the gun fights between police and mobsters on Highway 218.

On Monday, Francis Eldeker of Clarksville, a retired Northern Railway worker, gave a presentation of “Trains on the Farm and Train Safety.” There was also a plowing demonstration after lunch.