Kewaunee County: Here Comes the Thrashing Crew, Fire Up the Cook Stove!

Grandma always said they ate like a thrashing crew. "They" were the boys. And the thrashing crew? It's hard for the non-retired - especially the city slickers - to understand.

Thrashing was just about the year's biggest farming event. Like so many other things, it was a man's domain.. Thrashing was hard work and neighborhood men went from farm to farm working together to get the shocked grain off the field, into the thrashing machine and finally the granary. Men, often referred to as "the menfolk", did all the outside work, but it was the women who fed them and the esteem in which women were held was often determined during thrashing.

The crew would show up at a farm right after the previous farm was finished. Whether it was morning or afternoon, the farmer's wife had to be prepared. In addition to meals, the women provided morning and afternoon lunches that were more like a meal than a snack. Roasts, chicken, pork chops. Cake, pie and more cake and pie. Bread to be baked. As the saying goes, the men worked from sun to sun but the women's work was never done. Often a woman's sister or friend came to help make the huge amounts of required food and wash the mounds of dishes for which water had to be hauled and heated.

Friday had moved to her husband's farm following their marriage. A few months later her mother-in-law suddenly died. Nobody told the city girl about thrashing. Her husband just figured she knew what to do when the crew showed up. That first early morning Friday thought she'd bake a cake for dinner, but when the men came for mid-morning lunch, they not only ate the cake but they ate most of her dinner too. Luckily her sister had chosen that day to visit. Seeing the men at the table four times in one day convinced Sis to stay and help for the next few days.

Friday's neighbor on the next farm was most impressed by the men who  worked so hard and so fast that they rarely had to come in for a meal. They even brought sandwiches and water for mid-morning.  After the crew's first year at that place, they knew they'd never go back to the house. Diapers hung from clotheslines criss-crossing the kitchen right above the table. Flies were thick on the diapers and were floating in the water pail. Running water had yet to be a rural luxury and drinking water was dipped with a common dipper from the pail.

Pity the poor woman who set a good table. The men rushed to get there and then slowed down to get one last good meal before moving on. Good cooks were exhausted. Everybody on the farm was glad to see threshing done, but maybe the woman of the house more than anyone. She had twelve months before she had to do it again. For Friday, thrashing came faster than Christmas.

Note: The photo is from Cousin Marie, an historian whose dad used his camera to chronicle so much early 1900 history.