http://www.FarmCollector.com March 2016 19
Corren’s family has a long history with the Albert City
show. “Four generations of my family grew up a quarter of a mile from here, south of the threshing site,” he says,
“and they worked in the fields that we’re threshing in now.”
Inspiration for FFA project
When it came time to develop an agricultural-based
project as part of his involvement in the Future Farmers
of America (FFA) chapter at Sioux Central High School, Sioux Rapids, Iowa, Corren found a way to incorporate old
iron. Then 16, he decided to create a cutaway that would
demonstrate the mechanisms of a decades-old threshing machine.
areas, including hands-on work with materials,” he says. “The project’s purpose is to develop skills in different
“We realized that a lot of people don’t understand how
threshing machines work. My dad got the idea to add
plexiglass after seeing similar displays at other threshing shows. We’ve never seen another thresher with it, so I took
the idea and ran with it.” The first part of the project was finding a thresher that
would work. “We started talking with the (Albert City)
Threshermen board,” Corren says. “They knew of a guy who had an old threshing machine that had been stored
in his shed for years. He decided to donate it to the show.
The board told us to just go ahead and use it.”That meant getting the nearly century-old machine –
a 1922 Wood Bros. Humming Bird built in Des Moines,
Iowa – to a former munitions factory just outside Albert City, where Corren and his family live. Now controlled
by a trust, the site offers space for projects like this. “They allowed us to work on the thresher in one of their
buildings,” Corren says.3- Attaching plexiglass to the
1922 Wood Bros. Humming Bird thresher. Original paint still shows
on a section of the thresher’s
windstacker tube at top. courtesy Scott Olson. Photo - Corren Olson uses a cutoff
saw to remove bolts and panels during disassembly of the Wood
Bros. Humming Bird thresher.
Photo courtesy Scott Olson.
3.Humming Bird. A finishing touch: cleaning the Photo courtesy
Scott Olson. - Bird thresher. The intact side of the Humming Photo by Bill Vossler.
- In presentations at the
Threshermen’s show, Corren shared details on field conditions
and harvest practices he learned
through conversations with old-timers. He also described the era
when machines like the Humming
Bird were in use. Vossler. Photo by Bill
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