Introduction

Most museum visitors would recognize a threshing machine, having first become acquainted with them at the Harvest or Thanksgiving celebrations hosted by museums and living history sites. Embodying more than one hundred years of mechanical evolution, these large, technologically-advanced machines must also be acknowledged for the essential role they played in Canada’s agricultural development — particularly in the ascendancy of “King Wheat” on the Canadian Prairies.

There is a great deal of lore associated with threshing — from tales of working by moonlight to “get the crop through” before it was frost-damaged, to stories of the enormous quantities of food that had to be prepared for threshing crews. Many museum collections contain panoramic photographs showing a group of workers arrayed in front of a steam engine, water wagon, threshing machine, and eight to ten wagons of stooks ready for threshing. In Western Canada, the photos usually come from the estate of a local thresherman. In the East, they are often mementoes kept by community members who, in their younger days, may have gone west as Harvest Excursionists to find work on threshing crews.

The ten threshing machines in the Museum’s collection showcase the technology’s development, from an early manual-feed machine about the size of a refrigerator — capable of threshing seventy bushels of grain per day, to a large machine used by custom threshermen — able to process as many as two thousand bushels per day. From the birth of Canada’s agricultural equipment manufacturing industry, many firms focussed on the production of threshing machines or included them in their product lines. All of the threshing machines in the Museum’s collection were manufactured and used in Canada.