Indholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2024 i Farm Collector

Recently, a surprising and delightful thing happened to me at my office. I’ve struck up a friendship with a lovely woman who works in our mail room. Her name is Roberta. She makes her rounds, delivering reader mail and newly printed magazines and has worked part time with our publishing company for just shy of a decade. We began sharing small treats with one another. She gave me a “bluebird of happiness” figurine for my office, I gave her a couple small potted plants, another day she brought me a sweet treat. Our friendship progressed, and we made it official on Facebook, as one does, when she made an interesting discovery which she shared with me. Roberta was my late-grandmother’s high school classmate! This world is truly filled with fascinating…

Farmers have been tight with a nickel since the nickel was invented, so it comes as no surprise that enterprising salesmen found a way to offer a bargain. The surprise comes when the salesman is also the warden of the Minnesota State Prison. In this 1903 letter, Warden Henry Wolfer offered sale pricing on binder twine to an individual farmer, but also extended the deal to clubs the farmer might be associated with. “These prices are from 3 to 4 cents per pound below prices named by other manufacturers for twine of equal grade and quality,” he noted. Twine, threshing machines and farm implements Why was Warden Wolfer peddling twine? Because the Minnesota State Prison in Stillwater had operated prison industries since 1859, when prisoners were paid 75 cents a…

“Persevere, persevere, persevere.” Those words summarize the philosophy A.H. Patch adopted early in life and what likely led to his invention of the Black Hawk corn sheller, a hand-held implement that found an enthusiastic market worldwide. Asahel Huntington Patch was born in Hamilton, Massachusetts, on Nov. 11, 1825. He was the first of nine surviving children of Capt. Daniel and Lisabeth Gould Patch, Puritans who named their son after a kindly minister of the Congregational Church (a Puritan offshoot), Asahel Huntington. Patch would come to be known as A.H. Patch. Asahel’s great-grandson, Elwyn Patch of Clarksville, Tennessee, never knew his great-grandfather personally, but a speech that Asahel gave at a 1940s local Rotary Club meeting came to the attention of Elwyn’s late wife, Rubye, who shared those comments through the…

Ice-harvesting history I would guess that I witnessed the end of the era of ice harvesting. I was born in 1934 in Southwestern Minnesota. It was probably the 1940/41 winter. My father borrowed a friend’s iceboat and we went for a lake for a fast ride on a cold day. The lake was adjacent to Worthington, Minnesota. We went there in our Model T Ford from our home in Brewster, Minnesota. There was a group of men cutting slabs of ice with what I would call a “gang saw,” powered by a gasoline engine. There was a railroad siding along the side of the lake. I do not remember the method of elevating the ice onto the railroad cars, but I do recall horses were involved in the whole process.…

During the 1930s, ’40s and early ’50s, many farm papers published a feature called The Song of the Lazy Farmer, but the author of this on-going feature was never identified. I featured a good many of the old rhymes a number of years ago, but ran out of them in 2017. A while back, I discovered a few more from the spring of 1950. The lazy farmer wasn’t the only ne’er-do-well in the agricultural papers and magazines back in those days. Peter Tumbledown tormenting his hard-working and long-suffering wife was a comic strip that appeared regularly in Farm Journal magazine and other publications as well. Then there was Ben Puttin-it-off and his perpetually angry wife, Marthy, whose misadventures appeared in Farm Life magazine in the form of letters to the…

Glen Yoder’s extensive collection includes 100-year-old antique engines. Among his rare assemblage is a Reid oil field engine and a Fairbanks-Morse hit-and-miss engine made for the Mexican market. Glen’s interest in mechanical things including engines can be traced to past experiences. “Like most kids with farm interests, I had all kinds of scale model tractors. My family helped Grandpa with his farming operation. And so, I was hauling hay with Grandpa’s Ford Model 8N tractor when I was 10 years old,” Glen says. He continues, “Whenever possible, our family attended antique tractor shows. Through that early farm work and those shows, I started collecting antique engines. At age 13, I was drawn to a David Bradley garden tractor that I bought. I was excited to learn more about engines and…

Farm Collector is pleased to receive Sprouts pictures from the budding artists in our readers’ families. Please send your original submissions drawn on plain white paper to Farm Collector, 1503 S.W. 42nd St., Topeka, KS 66609. Also, please enclose the artist’s name, age and hometown, and a recent snapshot of the artist. A Farm Collector T-shirt will be sent to each artist whose work is published.…

Operators and parts manuals for the 06, 56, 86 Tractors, 41 bids, high bid of $370 McCormick Farmall lighted clock, 32 bids, high bid of $240 Farming Legends II lighted picture, 24 bids, high bid of $230 Farmall clock, 30 bids, high bid of $220 Various operators manuals for the letter series Farmall Tractors, 21 bids, high bid of $220 Farmall A, B, C, H, M Grill Body Dollies, 26 bids, high bid of $190 1/16 spec cast 25th Annual Red Power Round Up International 403 combine, 24 bids, high bid of $150 1/16-scale 2009 Red Power Round Up Farmall 460 utility with loader and rear blade, 19 bids, high bid of $150 For more information on this and other auctions, visit aumannvintagepower.com…

When thinking of the way farming has evolved, it’s easy to assume that it all started with people tilling the land with hand-tools, and from those primitive methods we moved on to using working horses, and finally we invented tractors with which to till the land. But this evolutionary ladder completely misses out one huge rung in the history of farming, namely the use of oxen. Oxen are beasts of burden that people have used for thousands of years, and which people still use today in developing countries. In Britain, oxen were used for a far longer period in history than horses, yet these beasts of burden are largely forgotten, and the part that they played in agriculture has almost become lost in the mists of time. You may have…