Peterson Farms: 52 Ancestors Prompt “Harvest”

Harvest Time in the Early Twentieth Century on the Paul and Oscar Peterson Farms

             Farming has changed so much over the last century. My brother grows some of the same crops as his father and grandfather did on the same land outside Hanska, Minnesota, but the equipment he uses to harvest it is amazingly different.

My grandfather needed to hire crews of threshers to harvest his wheat crops, as small farmers couldn’t afford to buy big threshing machines themselves, and didn’t have the large number of workers needed to run them. 

            The photo below shows a threshing crew. Most of the men would have been part of a traveling crew who moved from farm to farm over huge swathes of the Midwest, but probably a couple are my uncles, possibly Oscar or Phillip Peterson, or their cousins the Joramos. It was an exciting but busy time when the threshing crews arrived. Everyone enjoyed the company—extended family members joined the hired crews. The women were cooking non-stop to provide huge pot-luck meals to feed all the workers. Children were put to work at small tasks and caring for the animals while the men were in the fields for long hours. 

            Early corn harvests required a corn picker machine, which removed the cobs from the stalks. The cobs then needed to be fed through a “sheller” which removed the kernals from the cob. When the first combines were developed—machines that could simultaneously pick the cobs and shell them, spewing the shelled corn from a chute into a wagon, with the stalks, leaves and cobs expelled from the back of the machine—it was a great time saver.

            Here is a photo of my Aunt Thelma Peterson with my cousin Elaine Peterson, Thelma’s niece. The men behind them are shelling corn, and are my father, Juhl Peterson, and one of his cousins, either Loren or Junen Kyllo. They are working at Juhl’s brother Oscar’s farm, located just down the road from Juhl and Paul’s property.

            Below is a photo of my grandfather Paul with another man who may be his son Oscar, sitting next to a sheller. I believe they are at Paul’s farm. The original photo was very small—only 2x3 inches—and it was impossible to identify the people. I was delighted to discover my grandfather, in his old age, in the photo when I blew up the scanned photo. 

            Current combine harvesters are more expensive than many homes, starting at over $400,000. I wonder what my grandfather Paul Peterson would have said about that! Farming has become an expensive and complicated business, and I admire my brother’s commitment to it. Finding photos of my Peterson ancestors at work on their farms reminds me that Kent’s commitment was shared by my father, grandfather and great-grandfather—a century of hard work and sacrifice that I honor.