Published: September 06, 2008 04:09 pm            

HISTORICAL TREASURE: Corn sheller simplified life for farmers

TERRE HAUTE — Fall is just around the corner and with fall comes harvest time. This week’s historic treasure is a corn sheller, a machine designed to make the farmers work a little easier.

Corn shellers came in a variety of sizes, from small hand-held devices to large self-feeding conveyer belt-type wagons pulled by horses or powered by steam.

The example shown here is one of the McCormick Deering types made by International Harvester in Chicago around 1930. This particular sheller is a hand-cranked floor model designed to be operated by two people. One person cranked the handle while the other fed the ears of corn into the sheller. The flywheel on the outside made cranking the machine easier. A spur wheel, enclosed in a central housing, shelled the kernels from the cob, dropping both out of the bottom of the machine.

Newer designs like this one deposited the cobs out to one side and the kernels to another so that the operators didn’t have to separate them later. Two people working together could shell 60-80 bushels of corn per day. (A bushel equals 8 gallons.)

Corn is the No. 1 field crop planted in the United States, with Indiana being the fifth-largest producer of corn in the nation, behind Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Minnesota. According to the 2008 Statistical Abstract of the United States National Data Book, Indiana produced 157 bushels of corn per acre or 845 million bushels of corn in 2007. Curious, I did a little math. If the machine shown above were the most advanced sheller available, at 80 bushels of corn per day it would take 10,562,500 days or 28,938 years to shell that much corn. That’s a lot of cranking to do! So the next time you’re out driving and see a farmer harvesting his fields, give thanks and think how far we’ve come.

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.