August19_2010

Botanical Glossary - Home - References Cited

Photos - Moving on down highway 3A south toward Keremeos looking toward the big K of Keremeos Mountain (frames right and center) and north along highway 3A at the sage and rabbit brush covered hills of Keremeos Valley (frame left).

Photos - The next stop is to the Grist Mill at 2691 Upper Bench Road in Keremeos BC. Before poking around the grounds inside the historic site, I am focusing on displays of antiques that are out in the parking lot.

This device shown in these two rows of photos is an M. Moody & Sons Thresher with the machinery built into a wooden wagon (circa 1898). Threshing machine (or thresher), a device that first separates the head of a stalk of grain from the straw, and then further separates the kernel from the rest of the head.

The thrashing machine, or, in modern spelling, threshing machine (or simply thresher), was a machine first invented by Scottish mechanical engineer Andrew Meikle for use in agriculture. It was invented (c.1784) for the separation of grain from stalks and husks. For thousands of years, grain was separated by hand with flails, and was very laborious and time consuming. Mechanization of this process took much of the drudgery out of farm labor.

Early threshing machines were hand-fed and horse-powered. They were small by today's standards and were about the size of an upright piano. Later machines were steam-powered, driven by a portable engine or traction engine.

Threshing is just one process in getting cereals to the grinding mill and customer. The wheat needs to be grown, cut, stooked (bundled), hauled, threshed, and then the grain hauled to an elevator and the chaff baled. For many years each of these steps were an individual process, requiring teams of workers and many machines. In the steep hill wheat country of Palouse in the Northwest of the United States, steep ground meant moving machinery around was problematic and prone to rolling. To reduce the amount of work on the sidehills, the idea arose of combining the wheat binder and thresher into one machine—a combined harvester. About 1910, horse pulled combines appeared and became a success. Later, gas and diesel engines appeared with other refinements and specifications.

Click here for more photos of Keremeos for this day.