Threshing Days in Goessel
From shotgun-started tractors to hanky babies
Staff writer
The mechanized might of humongous historic farming contraptions will roar to life this weekend alongside the quieter country domesticity of low-German food, quaintly non-digital children’s crafts, and oral history at the 53rd annual Country Threshing Days in Goessel.
Organized by the Wheat Heritage Engine and Threshing (Wheatco) Club and local volunteers, the festival will turn Mennonite Heritage and Agricultural Museum grounds into what volunteer Susan Nafziger calls “stuff for all ages” — and all interests — Friday and Saturday.
Gates will open at noon Friday. Admission costs $7; children age 12 and younger are admitted free.
Admission is good for both days and includes entry to the museum.
Friday night’s music program at 7 p.m. in the high school gym will be Possum Revival — a bluegrass, country and gospel band from Hesston including father and son Brett and Caleb Klingenberg, and Aaron and Maria Billings.
A Main St. parade will start at 9:30 a.m. Saturday.
This year’s modern theme is lawn and garden equipment, but the heart of the annual exhibition and the club’s historic collection is old stationary engines and farm equipment that mechanized farming.
It honors those who pioneered American farming, Wheatco club president Jim Rippe said.
“This whole area, the middle part of the United States, became a country that would grow feed, food of all sorts for people and for animals,” he said during preparations and set up of the exhibition this week. “Basically, you’re taking a look back to 1940 and before.”
Equipment being lined up along museum grounds promises a geekout for gearheads.
One special display, Rippe said, will be “a whole row of tractors that have unique starting systems.
“We’ve got one coming that starts with a shotgun shell,” he said. The shell is fired by a hammer.
An engine shed has at least half a dozen large, stationary engines that were used to power everthing from ships and submarines to combines.
Nearby, a sawmill powered by a single cylinder, 45 horsepower engine will cut logs while visitors watch from bleachers, getting the full industrial conveyor display of logs rolling from modern skid steers onto a carriage pushed past a giant saw blade and a drive-train full of belts, with an edger straightening sides and stripping bark.
“It’s really an operation that to fully get it, you have to be here and watch it for a little bit,” Rippe said.
Out in a field, four towering threshing machines and binders show what Rippe called processes “one notch above horses.”
Bundles of wheat shocks cut back in June will be pitched into a thresher that knocks kernels out and blows straw and chaff away.
Then there’s the popular counterpoint of Uncle Milt’s Shed and its shaded yard where Nafziger will set up almost a dozen non-stop projects kids and families can do to see how things were before screentime.
She’s prepared for more than 100 kids — based on past years’ participation, she said.
Her newest “make it and take it” activities are “hanky babies” made by rolling a piece of cloth into what looks like babies in a cradle, and folded paper fans, which back in the day were made from church bulletins during unairconditioned services.
These were activities for when ”young children were required to be quiet and respectful” in church or other gatherings.
She also plans for kids to make a paper mosaic water melon and then try traditional German-Russian snack of a bite of melon with a bite of a crunchy deep-fried cruller. For a super-realistic throwback — and a chance to cool off — kids will be able to try washing clothes by hand in a tub with a ribbed washboard.
A low-German meal served at the grade school will include a la carte items such as verenika, sausage, bierocks, New Year’s cookies, zwieback, and “funeral cheese” (aka Colby).
A state-sanctioned weighted pedal-tractor pull competition will test leg strength of kids ages 4 to 12.
The “full pull!” cry by judges for anyone who completes the distance earns cheers and a trophy, she said, adding “one girl from Goessel made it all the way to the nationals once.”
On Saturday, museum board vice president Greg Schrader will be on hand with video gear for the “Voices from the Past Oral History Project,” recording low German speech.
“They want to capture this language and then use it in the museum,” Nafziger said, imagining a future where a visitor “could hear some of these words and things.”