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From the Morgue
Sharon Sanders
The Southeast Missourian's resident historian Sharon K. Sanders blogs about interesting pieces of local history pulled from the newspaper's morgue -- the place where our old editions are kept.
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1939 wheat harvest

Posted Thursday, July 17, 2014, at 12:00 AM

A story about a wheat harvest in June 1939 caught my eye as I was collecting materials for the Out of the Past column.

Actually, it was the photographs that ran with the story -- unusual for that era -- that attracted my attention. I had seen them before among G.D. Fronabarger's unidentified images. Now, at last, two mysteries were solved. The third photo of three boys holding rabbits that was published with the article, however, has yet to be found among Frony's negatives.

Scenes like the above are common throughout the district this week as farmers harvest their 100,000-acre wheat crop. This photo was made on the Sam Neece farm, near Chaffee, while a combine was cutting and threshing a crop that is yielding 20 bushels per acre. Glenn Grindstaff is driving the tractor and Carl Skaggs is a tender on the combine. The combine is fast replacing the binder in this section.

It's a great satisfaction to the farmer to sit atop the wheat sacks in his truck as the golden grain of the annual wheat harvest is turned out by the modern combine. Above are shown Kelly Grantham, Charles Neece and L.D. Yount atop the sacks in a truck on the Sam Neece farm near Chaffee.

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  • Down here in South Florida, farmers set fire to the sugar cane fields right before they are harvested. That burns off all the "trash" leaving only the stalks which contain the sugar sap behind.

    It also chased out the snakes, rats, rabbits and other wildlife.

    In the days before mechanical harvesters replaced the imported Jamaican cane cutters, the workers would line the perimeter of the burn with clubs and their cane knives to harvest that night's dinner from the fleeing critters.

    -- Posted by ksteinhoff on Thu, Jul 17, 2014, at 10:55 AM

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