Old-fashioned threshing recently held near Osage

Following in the footsteps of his immigrant forefathers, Van Massirer, of the Osage Community, recently held an old-fashioned threshing using the same type of farm equipment used by his father and grandfather.

A large number of nostalgic observers were on hand to watch the binding and threshing of oats using period farming equipment.

Massirer is a descendant of Austrian immigrants who purchased the family land in 1896, just four years after their arrival in Texas. The first three Massirer generations were farmers with only minimal interest in livestock. Eventually, a conversion began from cropland to grass for livestock grazing and hay production.

Van Massirer has always possessed a desire to share what farming was like when he was a boy and has arranged a few threshing demonstrations in the past to share the procedures that farm families had to follow before the invention of more modern farming equipment. In past demonstrations, to be more authentic, mules were used to pull the wagons to the thresher, but for this event, antique tractors were used instead.

For the binding demonstration, Massirer, helped by a crew of neighbors and volunteers, used an antique McCormick-Deering binder to harvest the oats. From five acres of land, Massirer harvested the oats into bundles which were placed into approximately 260 shocks (stacks). The shocks were then left in the field for a week before the threshing process began.

The bundles were pitched into wagons and hauled to the threshing machine where workers used pitchforks to load the bundles into an antique thresher which dates to the early 1940s.

“Owning a thresher was somewhat of a status symbol and I recall being pretty proud when my father got his first one,” Massirer said.

Massirer remembers early day threshings which generally had a crew of fourteen workers.

“Breakfast was served from a cookshack before sunrise, and when the sun would rise in the east, work began,” he said.

Massirer recalled that sunset signaled the end of the day and if 2,000 bushels of oats had been threshed, it was considered a good day.

He remembered that workers, call “work hands,” were paid $5 per day and guys with a tractor pulling two bundle wagons (trailers) received $10 and free gas for their tractors, two guys with pickups to haul the threshed grain to the bin got $10 and free gas and the thresher man, who was responsible for looking after the thresher, got $10.

In addition, two cooks would be at the threshings – usually a husband and wife team who would make $10 total. Most of the time they would spend the night in the cookshack.

Massirer said that, as a boy, “my pay was free food, free clothing, free shelter, and free bedding.”