My oil painting based on a photograph depicting my father as a boy surrounded by his uncle, his aunt, and a Reeves steam engine.

In 1923, the J. I. Case Threshing Machine Company of Racine, Wisconsin, built a 65-horsepower agricultural steam traction engine, serial number 35654, boiler number 24411. I now own this historic machine. The cylinder diameter is 10 inches, the stroke 11 inches. The traction speed is 2.4 mph. The boiler carries a maximum steam pressure of 150 p.s.i., and the engine’s estimated weight is 10 tons. This engine cost approximately $2,000 new. In the mid- to late-1920s, the Mountain Dew Coal Company in Lexington, Kentucky, sold the engine to Arch Hager, who took it by railroad to Berea and later drove it to Jackson County to power a rock crusher. Next, the engine went to the Case branch house in Louisville. Joe Peel bought it and brought it by train to Nicholasville. Joe and his sons were custom threshermen, but they also used their engines to fill silos, crush rock, clear hedge, buzz wood, steam tobacco, and make molasses. The Peels put my engine to work crushing rock at Glass’s Mill. Joe’s son Carl often ran it. In the late 1930s, Joe sold the engine to brothers Cecil and Vernon Johnson. Cecil was a farmer and an auctioneer. In 1968, Cecil and Vernon sold the engine to Howard M. Dunn of Mt. Orab, Ohio. Howard restored it from 1968 to 1969, and it inaugurated the Ohio Valley Antique Machinery show in Georgetown. Howard’s son Lloyd sold the engine to me in 1995.

When I was one year old, my parents took me and my brother to the Central States Threshermen’s Reunion at Pontiac, Illinois. Although I do not remember this event, I have since had ample opportunity to become better acquainted with the Pontiac show. The Central States Threshermen’s Association is one of the three second-oldest organizations sponsoring an annual thresheree; the others, the Pioneer Engineer’s Club of Indiana and the Rough & Tumble organization in Pennsylvania. All three organizations trace their origin to the same year. The National Threshers Association, which now stages its show in Wauseon, Ohio, has the distinction of being the oldest organization to continue to offer an annual rally. Pontiac, the Pioneer Engineer’s Club, and Rough & Tumble celebrated their fiftieth anniversaries in 1998. With an atmosphere resembling an old-fashioned county fair, shows feature antique farm equipment in action. At the Pontiac show in 1997, my Case pulled a twelve-bottom plow without trouble. Exhibiting my engine at Pontiac accomplished one of my boyhood aspirations. A trip to the Pontiac show was an annual excursion for my family. My parents enjoyed watching the antique steam engines performing the tasks for which they were designed: threshing wheat and other grain, sawmilling, and general beltwork.

Agricultural steam engines developed in the 1830s and have continued in use through today, although the firing of steamers has been a recreation, not a means of earning a living, since World War II. My father’s uncle Charley Cobb ran a Reeves steam engine that Joe Williams purchased in 1911 for a threshing circuit, called a "ring," east of Pine Village, Indiana. Charley brought the Reeves rig (consisting of the engine, a water wagon, and a threshing machine) to each farm belonging to the ring and threshed wheat and oats. My father grew up around the Reeves engine. Margaret, who was married to Charley, took a photograph of my father, Joseph C. Rhode, when he was about three years old; he is standing by the driver wheel of the Reeves engine. Basing my work on Aunt Margaret’s photo, I have painted the scene in oils. My father eventually learned to run the engine. At one point in his teenage years, he drove a rear-geared Gaar-Scott along a country road to a farm where Charley then replaced my father at the controls and hauled a house to a new location.

My mother, Ida Marie Coan (before she became Ida Rhode), spent her early years near the Keck-Gonnerman Company in Mount Vernon, Indiana. In the evening after the factory whistle announced quitting time, she and neighborhood children played on the engines parked in the lot. At Pontiac years later, my mother thought the Keck-Gonnerman engines the most beautiful of all the makes represented at the show.

While I was in grade school and high school, I saw several farm engines near my hometown. Glen J. Brutus had a collection of Case engines, including a 110-horsepower model. An undermounted Avery was parked alongside the big Case. Leonard Mann hosted an annual threshing bee with his own Case on his farm. I still remember striding through the golden wheat stubble to approach the fascinating machine belted to the separator. I recall playing on the rusting hulk of a rare high-wheeler Reeves engine in the fence row of Windy Stingle’s place.

Early on, I learned to appreciate the farm steam engines and their legacy. For me, they symbolize both the industrial era in American agricultural history and a time period characterized largely by cooperation among farmers and commercial threshers. I earnestly defend the theory that the nostalgia experienced by people who admire the steamers originates in an epoch unusual for the extent of good feeling that existed. With justice, many have called that chapter in American history a "golden age." While scholars debate the hypothesis—many finding the turn of the century a time of cutthroat competition, unendurable drudgery, and deep misery—I point to the thousands of first-person narratives that describe the era in glowing terms as evidence to the contrary.

The steam engines belong in the context of a past best described as rural. Until the teens, rural values guided the thinking of the majority of citizens. These principles find expression in a variety of forms of literature from fiction to nonfiction, from esoteric to popular. As a professor of English, I focus on this literature to search for the truest possible depiction of the American agricultural past.

I am delighted that my work—researching and teaching literature at the college level—is synonymous with my fun. I view the study of the steam era as a continual learning adventure. My friend Bill Lamb once said that steamers are exciting because, no matter how much a person studies the steam engine, there is always more to learn. The distinguished professor Joseph Campbell taught his students to follow their bliss. I am following mine.