Threshing at East Palmyra
by Beth Hoad
Palmyra Historian
As winter winds down and area farmers plan ahead for spring planting let?s take a trip back to harvest times of the past. During the 1800?s the large number of horses required for farming and transportation ate a lot of grain, mostly oats. Before the Age of Steam or the internal combustion engine; before modern self-propelled computerized combines with air-conditioned cabs, farmers hand-threshed their grain with a flail, an arduous and slow backwrecking job. Until the mid-1800?s the plants were cut with scythes and gathered into upright stacks called shocks with longtined rakes or by hand, then loaded onto horse-drawn wagons with pitchforks. It was transported to the barn where the grain was separated from the stems by beating with a flail and stored for later use in the granary. Later, the grain cradle came to the aid of farmers as the 1800?s wore on which enabled them to cut and gather the grain into shocks in one motion.
After the Civil War period, portable coal-fired steam engines came into use especially in the northern states. By World War I most grain was threshed with heavy, noisy dust-belching, ironwheeled, belt-driven machines powered by heavy slow-moving steam tractors or stationary steam engines. From about 1920 to the mid-1950?s, Wayne County farmers organized neighborhood threshing crews, or rings, while others hired special crews to come to their farms, as was the case in East Palmyra.
Typical wooden barns contained granaries built of wood planks, in which oats, wheat, barley and other feed grains were stored for winter use. The granary was box-shaped and divided into two to four sections to keep the types of grain separate.
There was such a granary in the original dairy barn on this farm. Since it had not been used in many years for its intended purpose, one rainy day we dismantled it to free up the space for baled hay and straw storage. We removed the 18-inch wide boards of the outer wall revealing an inner wall of tongue-and-groove boards that had been hidden from view for decades and which revealed some local history.
Joseph J. O?Meal opened his Case dealership in East Palmyra in 1917, then dealing in J. I. Case steam tractors. He also ran a grain-and-bean threshing business where he went from farm to farm threshing grain and red kidney beans for about 20 years. Fred and Frank Beal, locally known as the Beal Brothers and whose family owned this farm from 1823 to 1939, were among his first customers. Our demolition revealed inscriptions on that inner wall including the business name, ?Joseph J. O?Meal Threshers, Wayne County, NY?, as well as the following signatures, dated August 11 and 12, 1917: Jacob Van-Haneghan, Walworth, NY; Herbert DeLyser, East Palmyra, NY; Abram DeLyser and Mrs. Abram DeLyser; Daniel E. Brondell, East Palmyra; W. J. Barrett; Valentine Rampf; William LeRoy. Two out-of-staters, Howard L. Knapp, Luthers Mills, Pennsylvania and Harvey A. DeLine (DeZine?) 43-84 17th St., San Francisco, California also signed the wall. Of course questions arose such as why were out-of-staters working in an East Palmyra, New York threshing crew? We wondered if they were related to someone on the crew or an area farmer, or if they were simply transient farm laborers? As a historian, I thought how cool it would be if someone who reads this article might have some answers to these questions.
Through the 1950s J. J. O?Meal, Inc. sold Case tractors and farm equipment such as hay rakes, manure spreaders and plows as well as household appliances from the familiar ca 1946 cement block building on Lyon Rd. at East Palmyra. For a few years, Albert O?Meal ran the threshing business utilizing a modern-at-the-time self-propelled combine, which we later bought when he updated his equipment However, as small farms were sold and the surviving ones increased their acreage farmers became more independent. They bought their own machines and custom threshing jobs decreased. O?Meal quit the harvesting business and took over the dealership in 1967, at which time it became O?Meal Tractor. He increased their merchandise to include Arctic Cat snowmobiles and expanded the Homelite equipment line.
In 1975, the partnership of Joseph Wizeman and David C. Lyon bought the dealership and added Polaris snowmobiles, Tritan trailers and Ingersol lawnmowers to their line. Further changes within the farming community, competition from big box stores and corporate equipment dealerships, as well as health issues forced them to close their doors forever in 2006.
