The Story of Deering
Fifty years ago two young farmers named Marsh were cutting grain near DeKalb, Illinois. They were too intelligent—too American—to be fond of work for work’s sake. And of all their drudgery, the everlasting stooping over bundles to bind them into sheaves galled them most. Such back-breaking toil, they thought, might be well enough for kangaroos, but it certainly was not suitable for an erect biped, like man.
“If I didn’t have to walk from bundle to bundle, and hump myself like a horseshoe, I could do twice as much work,” said one of the brothers.
“Well,” said the other, “why can’t we fix a platform on the reaper, and have the grain carried up to us?”
It was a brilliant idea and a new one. Neither of the young fellows had ever seen a reaper factory; but they were handy and self-reliant. By the next autumn they were in the field with their new machine, and as they had expected, they bound the grain twice as quickly as they had the year before.
So was born the famous Marsh harvester, which proved to be the half-way mark in the evolution of the grain-reaping machine. It was the child of the reaper and the parent of the self-binder. It cut in two the cost of binding grain. But it did more than this—it gave the farmer his first chance to stand erect, and forced him to be quick, for the two men who stood on the harvester were compelled to bind the grain as fast as it was cut. Thus it introduced the factory system, one might say, into the harvest-field. For the first time the Big Minute made its appearance on the farm.
The Marsh boys, never dreaming that they had helped to change the destinies of nations, took out a flimsy patent on their invention, and went on with their farm work. Two summers later, as they were at work with it, their home-made harvester broke down. A farmer from Plano, near DeKalb, named Lewis Steward, was riding by. He stopped, and, being a man of unusual abilities and discernment, he at once saw the value of the Marsh machine, even in its disabled state.
“Boys, you’re on the right track,” he said. “If you can run your machine ten rods, it can be made to run ten miles. It is superior to anything now in use.”
Thus cheered, the Marsh brothers went to Plano, arranged a partnership with a clever mechanic named John F. Hollister, and began to make harvesters for sale. To their surprise the new machine was not welcomed. It was received with an almost unanimous roar of disapproval. It was a “man-killer,” said the farmers. Now, the Marsh brothers were quick, nervous men, and they had built a machine to suit themselves. But it was undeniably too fast and nerve-racking for most farmers. The labourers refused to work with it.
The Marshes overcame the obstacle in a very ingenious way. They put girls on their harvesters, instead of men. Not ordinary girls, to be sure, but vigorous German maidens, who were swift and skilful binders. Also, they had well-trained men, disguised as hoboes, who mingled in the crowd around the harvester at times of demonstration, and volunteered to get aboard of it. To see a girl or a “Weary Willie” binding grain on the new machine shamed the labourers into a surrender, and in 1864 two dozen of the Marsh harvesters were sold.