FLORENCE, Ont. — A stationery threshing machine manufactured in Quebec saw a century of active duty before it was given to the Sydenham Antique Club in 1990.
Fully restored 25 years later, it is now used regularly at the Grand Ole Power Days event that the club hosts in this rural community in southwestern Ontario.
Club member Paul Graham was among the dozen or so volunteers working on the machine. They saved as many of the original fastening pieces as possible along with wooden parts using the same tree species — ash — that members believe was used for the original construction.
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“When we first took this out and began using it, it was obvious it was going to fall apart unless we fixed it up,” Graham said.
“I think it might thresh 50 bushels of grain an hour or something like that, but that’s no more than a guess.”
The machine was donated to the club by J.W. Parsons, who used it at his farm near Jarvis, Ont. It includes wheels for transport, which club members feel was part of the original design. Parsons used a five horsepower Mogul engine to power it.
Even the oldest farmers feel young when they watch the machine operating. Club member Harold Snary believes it was built in 1886.
The faded hand-painted sign on one side of the machine, which was copied and reproduced, reads: “Le Champion Canadien, Fabriqué par La Campangnie Desjardins Limitée, Ste. Andre de Kamouraska, P. Québec.”
Club members feel it’s obviously a Desjardins thresher, built near the southern bank of the St. Lawrence River, but there’s still a little mystery concerning the machine.
The Canada Agriculture and Food Museum in Ottawa has four stationary threshing machines.
One is a Desjardins built in 1900, which looks nothing like the club’s machine. Another, a Keystone American Champion or Keystone Champion Américain, resembles the club’s machine in several respects but was built in 1895 by P.T. Legaré Limitée at Charlesbourg, now part of Quebec City.
A period advertisement for Legaré cautions farmers “that many makes of threshing ma-chines have made their appearance on the market under a similar name in order to confuse the buyer.”
“We don’t know whether companies stole ideas from each other, and we don’t know if someone or a company made those parts and another company put it together,” Graham said.
Tracing the exact origins of century-old Canadian-manufactured farm equipment is not simple. He said no catalogues list and describe the various makes and models of stationery threshing machines as there are in the United States.
Will Knight, curator at the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum in Ottawa, was impressed with the machine and the club’s efforts. The fact that it’s working is also important.
Knight said the museum used to operate equipment for the public before he joined the staff.
“Historically that’s the case. Not on my watch. In years gone by we used to have a larger staff here.”
Knight said vintage equipment should be kept out of the elements and someplace where the humidity levels are moderate and fluctuate slowly.
The Sydenham club members house artifacts in a large, steel-sided building with a raised cement floor.
Knight was also impressed with the machine used to power the thresher with a belt drive. It’s a replica of a Froelich tractor, the first gasoline-powered machine that could move both forward and backward on its own.
There are no original Froelich tractors. Only four were ever built and none survived.
The Froelich replica that the Sydenham club acquired is be-lieved to have been built 40 years ago following the original blueprints with minor variations, Graham said.
“We think this is the only one in Canada.”
The Froelich tractor was invented in 1892 by John Froelich, who later founded the Waterloo Gasoline Traction Engine Company in Iowa.
According to the Froelich Foundation, Froelich demonstrated his machine in South Dakota, where it powered a threshing machine to process 72,000 bushels of grain.
