The Harvest Story

The Purdue University Press has nominated this book for the 
Theodore Saloutos Memorial Award given annually for the best 
book in American agricultural history.

[To read reviews of this book, click on the button.]  For 
over fifty years, readers have turned to The Iron-
Men Album Magazine to savor firsthand accounts about 
American agricultural history. Now Dr. Robert T. Rhode has 
woven the best of these stories into a book that portrays 
the epic grandeur of North American wheat harvests from the 
Civil War to World War II. The Harvest Story: Recollections 
of Old-Time Threshermen chronicles the eyewitness reports 
of people who threshed grain with steam engines. It is a story 
of hard but honest work, of heartfelt cooperation, of triumph 
over tragedy.
               
Here are the panoramic scenes of threshing. Here are the 
magnificent dinners that generations of farm children likened 
to Christmas in July. Here are colorful characters. Here 
are wit and wisdom. Here are the factories that supported 
the agricultural enterprise. Here also are the dangers 
posed by machines. Through such a rich album of verbal 
pictures, The Harvest Story portrays the growth 
and development of a threshing culture in turn-of-the-
century America.
         
Illustrating the book are two dozen historic photographs 
from Dr. Rhode's collection. These pictures are published 
here for the first time. The Harvest Story is hard 
to put down, for it grabs readers' attention. It offers 
the lively recollections of those who pitched bundles 
of grain onto horse-drawn wagons, unloaded the bundles into 
the threshing machine, and watched the stream of clean wheat 
pour from the grain auger. This well-researched book transports 
readers back to the golden age of American agriculture.
The Harvest Story, ISBN 1-55753-208-7, is published by 
the Purdue University Press.