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Posted on Mon, Jun. 23, 2008

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Brothers invented first Gleaner

The Wichita Eagle

This is one in a series of vignettes celebrating Kansas history. The series' name comes from the state motto, Ad astra per aspera: "To the stars through difficulties."

BY BECCY TANNER

Miles of bronze-colored wheat fields, threatening gray skies and combines belching clouds of dust have long symbolized the Kansas wheat harvest.

The annual harvest and amount produced is why Kansas is nicknamed "The Breadbasket of the World" and why two of the state's colleges -- Wichita State University and Bethel College -- have wheat-related mascots, the Wheatshockers and Threshers.

As this year's harvest gets into full swing around the Wichita area, the farmers producing the crops are carrying on a tradition filled with a rich legacy.

In the 1870s, wheat began to take on significance in Kansas as Russian Mennonites arrived in Kansas.

The Mennonites settled around such farming communities as Goessel, Inman, Buhler and Moundridge.

Railroads came in, mills were built and the wheat and flour was transported to market.

As popularity of the hard winter wheat grew, much of the Kansas prairie was turned over to wheat.

By the turn of the 20th century, huge threshing crews were needed to harvest the wheat. Neighbors and hired hands moved from farm to farm to help bring in the harvest.

It was hot, sweaty work alongside horse-drawn wagons, where belt-driven threshing steam engines separated the grain from straw.

Farm wives and children still too young to work the fields were enlisted to set the tables and fill them with platters of home cooking to feed the large crews.

"Usually the eats were wonderful but you just might have bad luck once in a while," wrote Howard E. Weller, who described working as a boy on a Meade County threshing crew. "One time we were threshing for a bachelor who was a notoriously poor cook. He had some biscuits that were simply impossible to eat. We had considerable machine trouble and were at his place for several days. So we were very happy when we finally were ready to pull away from his place to his brother's, who was a married man."

But finding adequate manpower to harvest the crop was always a problem.

In 1910, three brothers who grew up in Finney County invented a self-propelled harvester-thresher nicknamed the "Gleaner." The brothers, Curtis, George and Ernest Baldwin, formed the Baldwin Co. in Nickerson and began assembling their threshing machines.

The machines significantly reduced the numbers of people needed to harvest wheat. The Gleaners were pulled around the field by four horses. It took two men -- one to drive the team and another to run the gasoline engine and tie the sacks of wheat.

The brothers soon developed other models. By 1924, they developed a combine that was Gleaner thresher mounted on a Fordson tractor. Their first combine was assembled in Wichita. They demonstrated it at the Wichita Farm Show in 1925 and took hundreds of orders.

The company contracted with Butler Manufacturing Co. to build the machines. The harvester-threshing machines sold between $900 to $1,500, depending on which model a farmer wanted.

Reach Beccy Tanner at 316-268-6336 or btanner@wichitaeagle.com.