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["Don Bowen" <don.bowen AT earthlink.net>]

Time for a little history.  Remember that agricultural history is one of my
interests.

Corn has been harvested by hand from its earliest beginnings in Mezo America
around 4000 years ago.  By the middle 1800s the biggest development was the
husking palm.  It is a leather pad worn like a glove with a metal hook on
the palm.  A good husker could grip the ear and with the hook remove the
complete ear form the husk then throw the ear in a wagon.  Two men on either
side of a wagon could pick a acre a day.

Corn planting was in hills three feet apart set on a square using a tool
called a Corn Jobber.  This tool replaced hand planting and allowed the
farmer to walk along and plant with out stooping.  Horse drawn cultivators
replaced farmers with hoes in the mid 1800s and soon after the check row
planter replaced the corn jobber.  The check row planter was used well into
the 1920s.

The check row planter used a knotted wire to trigger the seed drop
mechanism.  The wire was strung from one end of the field to the other.  An
arm extended from the planter to guide the next row and I have been told
that a strong farmer could flip the entire length of the wire with one
movement.  Check row planting placed the hills in perfect three foot squares
so corn could be cultivated in two directions.  When I was growing up you
could often see rolls of check wire in the fence rows.

The ground powered corn binder was developed to ease harvesting.  The corn
binder would cur stalks off near the ground and hold them on a platform
until a bundle was large enough when they would be tied together.  The ears
still had to be husked but the corn could be brought in and stored.  The
fall scene of a bundle of corn with pumpkins and a scarecrow is from the use
of a corn binder.

In the 1880s the snap roll corn picker was developed.  Two long rubber
rollers would snap the ear out of the husk and carry that to the following
wagon.  These were not that successful as ground powered units because of
the tendency of the corn jamming in the rolls.  When power farming started
in the early part of the 1900s one of the first machines was the tractor
powered corn picker using snap rolls.  For almost the next 50 years this was
the preferred method of harvesting corn.

The snap roll picker was extremely dangerous.  Many a farmer lost hands,
arms, and lives to the snap roll picker.  A common problem was plugging and
the usual fix was to unplug it with it running.

Corn was stored in corn cribs.  These cribs were made with boards set apart
to encourage air flow and the corn dried.  The openings also allowed mice
and rats free access to the corn and a good set of barn cats were a real
asset.

Corn usually has to be shelled to be used.  Every farm had a hand sheller.
Some were large and needed twp People to operate.  Some were small and
needed only one person to operate. For chicken food and some human uses the
kernels had to be cracked in another machine.

By the late 40s it became economical to dry corn with gas driers so many
farmers would pick the corn then pass it through stationary shellers.  The
corn could then be stored in sealed metal grain bins with significantly
reduced rat damage.

In the early 50s several experiments were underway to shell corn using the
heaters on a combine and by the mid fifties almost all combine manufactures
has corn heads.  These corn heads used the shielded snap rolls originally
developed in the late 30s.  The shielded snap rolls were much safer.

By the middle 60s almost half of all corn harvested in the US was shelled in
the field with combines mounted with corn heads.  By the 80s almost all corn
was harvested this way.

We moved to the farm in 1950.  We had a two row pull behind corn picker and
a two row corn planter.  By the twenties the drop mechanism was powered by
the planter wheels.  We soon bought Minneapolis Moline UBU D Special with a
mounted two row corn picker, four row mounted cultivator and a four row
planter.  I spent many hours on that tractor cultivating corn.

We build a large corn crib that still stands and used elevators to lift corn
poured out of wagons to the top.  That is where I learned to back a four
wheeled wagon. Some of my earliest tractor driving was pulling the wagon
alongside the picker while it filled than taking the wagon to the corn crib
to empty then going back for another load.

By the late fifties we had some Butler steel gain bins built and a
stationary sheller was used. By the early sixties we had a combine with a
corn head.  When I left the farm in 1964 most of the corn was shelled but
some was still picked and used for hog feed.

The last time I traveled through corn country I saw only one corn picker in
operation.  The rest was all harvested by combines with corn heads.

Don Bowen  KI6DIU
http://www.braingarage.com/Dons/Travels/journal/Journal.html