THE WAY IT WAS…
...Inventiveness and Innovation
by Al Eicher

Editors note: All photos courtesy of the C.F. Sturm Family Collection unless otherwise noted.

I grew up in Huron County and was fortunate, over the years, to witness the inventiveness and innovation happening in the farm community. It was after WWII and these were the best of times. Several years ago I was talking with some friends from our church who both worked for the Ford Tractor Division. When I told them I grew up in Pigeon, they said they tested machinery on various farms through the Webber Brother’s Ford dealership. They went on to say “farmers up there were developing tools and machinery on their own to make planting and harvesting easier…we got a lot of good ideas from them.”

In 1994 while producing a video documentary on the history of Pigeon, I saw a 16 mm film photographed by C.F. Sturm and son, Don. This film, shot in the late 1930s and into the 1960s, captured many scenes of “farm built machines” showing the inventiveness of people who wanted to make some of the tasks on the farm easier to handle and save time.

Charlie Sturm was certainly an innovator when it came to making various harvesting jobs easier. He first made a conveyor in the early 1940s for loading sugar beets (see photo). It worked rather well and was used for several years. The Yackle brothers, Willis and Orville, were also finding ways to make tasks around the farm easier. They had dairy cattle and with an inventive spirit build a manure loader, without hydraulics, using cables and pulleys (see photo). The Yackle brothers had bigger ideas and soon they were at work building a bean harvester. Not far away, Otto Trost developed a carriage and loading device for handling the manure at his farm (see photo).

Charlie Sturm also decided to make his own threshing machine to handle the navy bean harvest. He mounted the complete apparatus on an old truck frame. Using several motors, it became a self-propelled bean harvester (see photos). In the late 1940s, he also built a beet topper and harvester (see photo). Some engineers from the International Harvester Company came out to see the way it worked and later engineered a beet harvester similar to Charlie’s.

In the early 1950s, when I was in high school, some of the Bergman family boys were in my class. Billy Berman and his dad were building a stone picker. At first people hearing about it kind of joked about it. As I recall the machine was developed, tested and refined over a few years and finally put into operation. I don’t know if they sold many of them but I do know Billy removed a lot of stones from golf courses around the country for many years. I saw the machine in operation only once. Here was a machine built to clean up surface stones on agricultural land and, in the 1950s and ‘60s, with the boom of developing golf courses, the machine had another major use. By the way, I have been looking for a photo of the picker for several years. If anyone has a photo or brochure of the stone picker give me a call. I remember, during the spring, helping my Grandpa Sting pick up stones in the fields and load them on a wagon pulled by his team of horses, Dick and Doll.

In the 1940 and '50s many fields looked like small lakes in the spring and needed drainage. Adolph Wurst was an inventor and fabricator of a tiling machine and several other farm harvesting machines including the “pick-up beaner.” Walter and DeVere Sturm, a father and son team, also built a drainage and trenching machine. The machine, with its big wheel trenching tool, could dig six feet deep and carve out an 18-inch wide trench. Eric Kraft and his son, Lowell, also had a trenching machine operation.

I am sure there are many towns in the Thumb area with people telling stories of their local innovative people who took some metal, a few pulleys and cables along with a small engine and made various devices for improving life on the farm. Let’s keep the spirit of innovation alive in whatever we do!…and That’s The Way It Was…

Al and Dave Eicher provide television production services to corporations, ad agencies and nonprofit organizations.  They also create Michigan town histories and offer lecture services on a variety of Michigan History Events. You may contact them at  248-333-2010;  E-mail: info@program-source.com; Web site:  www.program-source.com.