Artifact Fanning mill. Keywords Fanning mills Harvesting machinery Harvesting Farming. Object ID Discover curious connections between artifacts. Buoyed by the prospect of finding real money, the boys spent most of the day hand-cranking oats through a small Clipper fanning mill, constantly on watch for the coin, which never appeared.
In earliest times, grain was harvested, stalks and all, and brought in from the fields to be threshed, either by animals such as horses systematically trodding on it, or by sledges dragged over it. Cleaning the threshed grain then was accomplished with winnowing pans: the grain and chaff were placed in a pan and tossed into the air. When all went well, the wind blew the chaff away and the clean grain fell back into the pan. This was a fairly slow, labor-intensive system though.
Early threshing machines just stripped grain and chaff from the straw, leaving a still-unfinished product that needed further cleaning before it could be used for making bread. Then about , along came fanning mills. They were simple affairs that cleaned coarse grains mostly wheat, oats and barley of such weed seeds as creeping jenny and bindweed.
Several such mills, representing early, middle and late styles, are in the collection at Little Village Farm, near Trent, S.
They have come over the years from friends, auctions and demolition sites, and collectively they show that the later fanning mills were not necessarily as well made as the earlier ones.
One of the oldest brands in the collection is Owens, made before in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The wooden slats were attached at regular intervals along the canvas and acted as brakes for the plant materials, giving the weed seeds a chance to fall through the screen while the bigger grain moved on to the bottom, where it was scooped into bags or onto a wagon. Of the two Owens fanning mills at Little Village Farm, one belongs to a neighbor, Reginald Crisp, whose family came to the area years ago.
They bought the mill new and always allowed neighbors to use it to clean their oats. Rattling, rubbing, gears turning, along with the motor noise. One of the many sounds in my nostalgic bank of farm memories. Fanning Mills. Toasters of Yesteryear. Mountrail County Courthouse. In many ways, a fanning mill resembles a miniature threshing machine. Both machines have shaking sieves over which the threshed grain kernels mixed with bits of straw, chaff, stones and soil particles rattle.
The smaller pieces fall through holes to a lower sieve where smaller particles are separated. Both machines have fans that move air across and upward through the sieves to float off the light straw, chaff and dust.
Only the threshing machine has a mechanism for knocking the grain kernels free of their attachment to the grain stalk. Before the introduction of threshing machines, grain was removed from the stalk heads by trampling or flailing. This operation was done usually on a wooden floor in a barn. Threshing barns were built for the purpose of storing grain sheaves from harvest time until the slack winter season when the fully mature grain could be separated from the dry straw. These barns were built around a central threshing floor where the bundles of ripened grain could be spread to a uniform thickness and treaded upon by hooves of horses or oxen or pounded by farm hands using wooden flails to loosen grain kernels from heads of the cereal plant stalks.
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