http://www.FarmCollector.com November 2018 13
Second find bails out auction buy
Looking for a way to reduce the labor associated with the
bean harvest, Jim’s father, Glen, bought an Owens thresher
at an auction. “The Swedes in the area kept asking for Swed-
ish brown beans for their traditional Swedish ‘bruna bönor’
served at church lutefisk dinners,” Jim says. “So the local
stores wanted the Swedish brown beans for the Christmas
season, starting just after Thanksgiving, and they sold out
of them quickly.”
But the Sodergrens’ Owens thresher was not all it was
cracked up to be. “My dad had never seen – or even operated- a bean thresher, so it didn’t turn out to be too promising,”
Jim says. “It was in poor shape, with heavily worn bearings
and cylinder, and it was missing a lot of parts. After seeing
all the rotten wood everywhere in the frame, he knew it just
wasn’t going to work out.” That meant a return to threshing
by hand.
A year later, while cutting firewood at a neighbor’s place,
Glen saw something familiar sticking up through the dirt
and leaves. When he investigated, he found the remains of
an Owens thresher identical to his. “This one was not so
worn out, and it had the pieces that the first one needed,”
Jim says, “and the metal cylinder and bearings were in better
shape. Between the two, he was able to build one working
thresher.”
Dry beans essential
When the beans were dry, the poles the plants hung on
were pulled out, loaded on a hay wagon and taken to the
threshing machine. Then the vines were released from the
poles into the thresher.
If the beans were not perfectly dry, problems were inevita-
ble. “They would wrap around the cylinder, and you’d have
to stop the machine and clean everything out,” Jim says.
“But if everything is good and dry, the pods will snap open
easy, and everything works well.”
Though most threshers are fed from the top, using pitch-
forks, the Sodergrens’ Owens was fed from the end, by hand.
“The cylinder and concave teeth knocked the pods open,
and the beans fell down on the shaker screen,” he explains.
“The blower blew the fine chaff out, while the stalks and
whatever else pushed its way out the back. Our machine had
many rows of notched wooden pieces that would oscillate
back and forth, working the straw on its way up and out the
back. Most of that wood was rotten and worn out when we
got the machine, so all of it had to be replaced.”Small but mighty
The cylinder teeth on the concave in the Owens are fixed
and cannot be adjusted. “As I remember, there was a pretty
coarse screen on the shaker under the cylinder,” Jim says.
“But beans and peas are quite large, so the screen was mainly
there to get the dirt out, because when you pull them out by
the roots, there’s going to be a lot of dirt. The machine had
a large blower to blow the finer chaff and dust out back.”
The beans and peas run through by themselves. “We used
a large washtub, maybe a 20-gallon tub, and put it under-
neath where the beans came out, and it takes quite a while
to fill it up,” he says. “It was amazing how many beans could
go through there in such a short time. It really did have a
large capacity for its size.”
Despite the fact that the Owens thresher could be run by
a single person, the Sodergren family turned the harvest into
a fun time. “We had a threshing party each year,” Jim says.
“Friends and relatives would come and watch, and help out
a little bit, and then we’d have a big meal afterwards. Usually
with bean soup, of course. ”Top left: A board in the front of the Owens drops down,
providing a platform from which bean stalks can be fed
into the thresher. The Owens’ narrow wheels would have
made it difficult to transport to the field. In fact, the crop
was brought to the thresher, rather than the other way
around.
Below: Minnesota farmers must have once produced a
significant crop of beans and peas, Jim Sodergren muses,
to justify production of an entire line of threshers in Min-
neapolis. The Owens company remained in business at
least into the late 1940s.
Above: Dating to the 1890s, the Owens bean and pea
thresher at the Almelund, Minnesota, threshing show
retains much of its original paint and stenciling
Left: The Almelund Owens bean and pea thresher em-
ploys a trio of fans. One blows the chaff into a pile outside
the thresher. A feeder fan is positioned in front, and a third
fan separates the peas from the vine. “They drop because
they are heavier,” Wayne Olson says. Photos by Bill Vossler.