by Morris Mott
Brandon University
Manitoba History, Number 18, Autumn 1989
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Ploughing demonstration, Threshermen’s Reunion, 1989.
Source: Morris Mott
In 1989 I was one of about 70,000 people who attended the Manitoba Threshermen’s Reunion and Stampede, held on the grounds of the Manitoba Agricultural Museum, Incorporated, near Austin. I was very impressed with the event, just as I had been with the first reunion I attended, in 1987. The Austin show reveals a lot about the everyday life of pioneers in Southern Manitoba, especially that the pioneers’ world was one of hard physical labour, day after day, morning to night.
In some ways the Reunion is a typical small town fair. There are rides for children, bingo games, and booths in which you can buy meals prepared and served by members of different churches or the Museum’s Ladies’ Auxiliary. There’s a dance at night. There are no baseball games, however. And this fair lasts four days, not one.
Each day’s events run according to the same basic schedule, and the highlight is the early afternoon parade of old machinery past the grandstand. People start filling the seats about an hour before the parade begins, and are entertained as they do so by a country and western band. The parade takes maybe an hour and a half. It features the giant steam engines that were prevalent on North American farms early in the twentieth century. In 1989 the parade included as well an enlightening display sponsored by the J. I. Case Company on the evolution of the tractor.
It is impossible to dislike the parade. The men and women who drive the old binders, tractors, road-graders and so on are the same individuals who have spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars fixing up the ancient equipment. These people care about their machines, and their enthusiasm for what they have done is communicated most effectively to the audience by the parade’s announcer, Ken Fordham of Ochre River. The main impression one gains from the procession is that sixty, eighty, a hundred years ago, to operate farm machinery was to be unceasingly cranking, twisting, pulling, pushing, shaking and scurrying around. Members of the audience may know in their minds that a revolution in agriculture occurred in the mid-twentieth century, when the use of rubber tires, hydraulic fluids and power take-offs became widespread. The parade allows them to feel this truth in their muscles and bones.
After the parade the spectators watch races in such pioneer tasks as grain-bag tying and sheaf tying. The most intriguing competition is the slow race for old steam tractors. The winner of the race is the machine that travels slowest from start line to finish line. It is disqualified if it stops moving completely. The assumption is that the slowest tractor has the best tuned engine.
After the races, people leave the grandstand and head to different sites on the Agricultural Museum’s grounds. Some of these sites and the attractions in them can be viewed all summer long, but they are best appreciated during the Reunion. There is a Homesteader’s Village with houses, schools, churches, a blacksmith shop, a livery stable, a general store, a print shop, a post office, a grain elevator designed for horse-drawn wagons, a train station, and other buildings commonly seen in prairie towns early in the twentieth century. These buildings all contain appropriate furniture and technology. In another part of the grounds, there is a Reunion Ladies’ Auxiliary Building that features a fashion show in which volunteer male and female models exhibit clothes that were popular between the 1890s and the 1920s. There are huts and buildings located here and there which house old pieces of farm machinery—tilling equipment, seeding equipment, threshing machines, binders, tractors, and more. There is also a Centennial Building that contains literally hundreds of items with which pioneers would have been familiar. Among these items are cars, spinning wheels, carpenters’ tools, horses’ harness, ice skates, stoves, dishes, musical instruments, and cream separators. There is a horse-drawn hearse, and a machine for making corn brooms. There is also a butter churn which serves as a reminder that the pioneer woman had no trouble finding enough work to do. She rocked the churn with her feet. This left her hands free to mend clothes or nurse a baby.
Finally, there is an area of the Museum’s grounds set aside for live demonstrations of pioneer jobs such as plowing a field, threshing, and sawing wood. These demonstrations are immensely educational. Artifacts are transformed into working tools. And here again what jumps out at the spectator is the great physical strength and endurance required of pioneer farmers — as well as the capacity to block out the discomfort or pain of a bad back, an arthritic knee, a sprained toe, a smashed fingernail or a burned arm.
Certain specific features of the Reunion are unsatisfactory. The rodeo held every evening reveals less about pioneer farming in Manitoba than it does about late-nineteenth century ranching in Alberta or Texas. Some of the machinery is not clearly labelled. But overall the Directors of the Agricultural Museum and the Reunion do a marvelous job. They entertain and educate at the same time. And they do so at a very reasonable price—an adult can see virtually everything on the grounds as well as eat two full meals there and spend less than $30.00 in total. Anyone interested in the history of Manitoba would enjoy, and be rewarded by, spending a day or two late in July at the annual Threshermen’s Reunion and Stampede.
For more information on the Threshermen’s Reunion and Stampede as well as on the Agricultural Museum, consult Penny Ham, Manitoba Agricultural Museum: 25 Years of Progress (Austin: Manitoba Agricultural Museum, 1979).
