When my grandmother, Viola, came to the Marty farm in the late 1920s, she documented the Marty farm with her camera. The quality of these photos is poor from the glaring sunlight, but you can still make out my grandfather, John, and his older brother, Sam, in their wide-brimmed hats. The trees in the distance are the woods along the north side of the farm.
Oats were an important crop for feeding horses, cows, and pigs. The straw made good bedding for the barns. The fields came ripe in July, turning from silvery green to gold.
Before tractors, the oats were cut and bound with an oat binder drawn by horses. Then, by hand, the bundles were set up into shocks to dry. The last photo shows stacks of sheaves behind the barn, like the grain stacks in Monet's 1890-91 paintings. I don't know how or when or exactly where they were threshed.
I am old enough to remember oats cut, bundled, and shocked in the fields. But by then, the early 1960s, horses had been replaced by tractors, and a crew came with my Grampa Anderson's giant threshing machine and made pretty short work of the oats. The thundering contraption stood behind the barn, wagons full of sheaves were pulled in from the fields, and men with pitchforks stood on the wagons and tossed the bundles one by one into the hopper. Out of one spout blew the chaff and straw into a loose stack, and out of another spout poured the oats in a stream, to be driven and deposited into the granary.
There's an old hymn I learned growing up:
Bringing in the sheaves,Bringing in the sheaves,
We will come rejoicing
Bringing in the sheaves! I knew it had a double meaning. The harvest metaphor meant bringing souls to Christ in time to be saved, before the apocalypse and judgment. The harvest of our oats meant anxiety for my dad and uncle because the ripe grain was so fragile in the fields, vulnerable to hail or even a hard rain or wind, capable of producing financial crisis or ruin. At the end of oat harvest they were smiling and laughing. Rejoicing.
Looking at these photos, I know my grandmother was honoring that heroic labor, verifying the anxiety of the men she worked for, especially the one she would marry, and rejoicing with them at the end, documenting the strength and faith it took to grow, gather, and arrange those dense towers of grain. She must have known that oat stacks and horses were vanishing from agricultural practice. She would save a picture for her children.
Oat harvest and stacks on the Marty farm, ca. 1930. From the photo album of Viola Hendrickson Marty.
Wonderful and what a rich family history you have documented!
Posted by: Joy Boyd | March 05, 2014 at 06:51 PM