Naper Settlement will be able to conserve a keystone artifact for its Agricultural Interpretive Center thanks to a $72,209 grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. The money, ...

Before the age of combines, wheat, oats, rye and barley were harvested with a threshing machine. My earliest memory of threshing grain is with a steam engine and wooden threshing machine. In those ...

Bob Cleavenger, left, and Herman Watson stand at the controls of a steam engine during the early days of the McLouth Threshing Bee. Watson organized the first threshing bee in 1957 on his farm east of ...

Restoring a steam engine is a bigger task than refurbishing a tractor or pickup truck. Just ask Austin Chapman and Caleb Kearney, who recently drove their restored 1914 Rumley steam engine from a farm ...

Matt Folstad had an idea: Rather than mow his 2 acres of yard every summer, why not plow it up and plant wheat on it? That was the start of his backyard threshing bee. Folstad, 38, works as a truck ...

Frank — serious as a farm mechanic can be when necessary and by turns a practical joker — drove his classic Stearns-Knight from its shed a couple times in summer. The Stearns-Knight, which was a ...

Hopkins, today, is easy to shrug off as just another suburb in the westward sprawl. But its history and growth are well-defined as the longtime home of an innovative, all-but-forgotten farm machinery ...

Around 1946, when Carol Ringler was barely big enough to see over the steering wheel, she climbed into the seat of a red International Harvester Farmall B tractor and slowly inched it up and down the ...

When this country was new and farming meant the difference between life and starvation, the men and women who tilled the ground planted winter heat, tended it through the spring and prepared for the ...