Farmers harvest some fond memories

There’s a lot of history on Crayton Guhlke’s 3,000-acre Davenport farm.

“My great-grandfather homesteaded out here in 1882. Me and my wife went to school here and we never left town,” he said.

As the years passed, five generations of farmers worked the land, which expanded as the family purchased additional farmland.

Guhlke’s wheat and barley farm was to be the site of an old-fashioned threshing bee on Saturday. There were 50 acres of wheat to be harvested by combines from the 1940s and 1950s, but Mother Nature had other ideas.

After overnight rain hammered the amber grains, the three-year-old community harvest festival was canceled.

Instead, the field of idle machinery became the site of an impromptu reunion of sorts, as a handful of people with lifelong ties to the community relived old times.

“I haven’t driven a tractor for 50 years, but I drove it yesterday. It all came back to me pretty readily,” said Mark Reinbold, a Spokane Valley resident who grew up in Davenport.

He and three other men, all about 70 years old, found common ground in reliving past chores that kept them busy as teenagers.

“I just figure cleaning out the barn was the worst chore,” Reinbold lamented.

Reinbold and his wife, Barbara, grew up together in Davenport, dated briefly, then married other people. Their spouses both died and when they returned to the community for a 50th high school reunion several years ago, the two rekindled their past romance.

Now celebrating a second year of marriage, the couple revisited their roots and connected with lifelong friends Saturday in Davenport.

“There’s nothing like harvest season – you just get it in your blood,” Barbara Reinbold said.

It’s not that a 1937 Caterpillar RD6 tractor or a Harris 1948 combine are exceedingly valuable or rare. Many farmers have one or two of the old machines tucked away. Guhlke joked that owners are “giving them away to get them out of their barns.”

But the red, green and yellow tractors and combines conjure up images of harvests gone by, a time when farming was the heart and soul of the community.

“We grew up on these fields. Harvesting was a big time of the year,” Guhlke remembered.

He organized the community threshing bee because he wanted to share a sense of history with his 16- and 17-year-old grandsons, who work the farm with their father.

The oldest machines required one man to drive the tractor and anywhere from one to three men to operate the combines, which were pulled behind. Combines separate the wheat sheaths from the kernels; the old models on display Saturday could harvest about 2,000 bushels a day.

Today’s all-in-one models can be operated by a single person and harvest 8,000 to 10,000 bushels a day.

Three old-style combines rely on tractors to pull them along. Two other models show the transition that happened in the 1950s, when pulled combines gave birth to self-propelled models that could be driven.

When those old-fashioned machines start simultaneously threshing the wheat field, people with a farming background know something unusual is afoot, said John Sawyer of Davenport.

“You get a lot of people who stop by just curious because they’ve never seen anything like it,” Sawyer said.

Sawyer said the combines were running for a while on Friday – before the rain hit – and attracted about 50 bystanders.

For the friends, the meticulously crafted machines brought back memories of handfuls of men laboring in the fields, while apron-clad mothers, sisters and wives spent entire days baking pies, frying eggs and cooking up enough food to feed armies of workers.

Hazel Wolfrum, a Spokane resident who was raised in Davenport, recalled cooking from sunup to sundown and doing laundry with a washboard. Nothing was simple back then.

While many of Saturday’s participants left Davenport years ago, they’ve never lost their connection to farm life.

“All of these people have little stories,” said Barbara Reinbold, who recalled having rock fights with others in the group as a child.

Guhlke doesn’t know when the bee will be rescheduled, since it takes two days of hot weather to dry out a soggy field.

In the meantime, the friends will just fire up their old memories.