Mid Michigan Old Gas Tractor Association Website (MMOGTA)

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The contents of the “Weekly Feature” page are provided to you for your entertainment, amusement, and perhaps information. Here you may find articles of interest, pictures, historical information on the Club, or whatever shuffles to the top of the pile on our desk. The only defined characteristic of this space is that we will make every effort to change/replace it around the middle of each week. Thank you for visiting, and please stop by again. Click on any photo to see it larger in a separate window.

Gathering in the “Grove”

“ Timing is everything”, they say, and we all know it can just as easily be bad or good. For the crew that gathered at Roger Birchmeier’s farm near Layton Corners, the timing was just about perfect. Who could have predicted sunny skies and temp’s in the mid 60’s on November 14th ? Just doesn’t happen that way here in Central Michigan, as a rule, but not a complaint was heard.

The occasion was the rebirth of an event that started probably a couple of decades ago, Roger’s Corn Husking Bee. Just an excuse for some of the club folks and neighborhood people to get together and dust off a few more pieces of the old farm equipment that we all treasure, have a little fun, and maybe relive a few memories from our formative years.

In truth, it’s really more about the process than the hardware. In the same manner as the threshing crews from years past would travel from one farm to the next, many of the other seasonal tasks often required more hands and more hardware than the typical small farmer could muster from his own operation. Out of need came innovation. One neighbor had the corn binder, another the husker, someone else the sheller, and maybe the guy down on the corner had a houseful of strong-armed teenage boys. All the ingredients were there somewhere in community, you just had to bring them together. Everyone had the same crops to harvest, and the lure of a big, home-cooked dinner helped to outweigh the hard work and cold feet of a typical corn harvest.

And so it was, while Roger’s big, modern combine languished in the shed, a sizable group gathered at the farm to recreate a scene more appropriate to the 1940’s, and harvest some corn the way it was done “back in the day”. As always, we try to get a few photos to remember the moment.

(click individual photos to enlarge)

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