Late 19th to Early 20th Century Sawyer & Massey Threshing Machine

 This threshing machine – sometimes called a thrashing machine, thresher, or separator – was made by the Sawyer & Massey Company, Limited, of Hamilton, Ontario. It was reportedly used near Ailsa Craig, Ontario, an agricultural center for that part of the Canadian province.
 Started in Hamilton in 1835 or 1836 by John Fisher, the firm that would become Sawyer & Massey built its first threshing machine in 1836. That same year, Fisher was joined in the company by his cousin, Calvin McQuesten. In the early 1840s, they were joined by L. D., Payson, and Samuel Sawyer, nephews of McQuesten and highly skilled machinists. The Sawyers gradually became leaders of the company, and when Fisher died in 1856, the company became L. D. Sawyer & Company.
 In 1889, Hart A., Walter E., and Chester D. Massey acquired 40% interest in the company, and Hart became president of the company. The company was soon reorganized and renamed the Sawyer & Massey Company, Limited. In 1910, the Masseys withdrew from the company and it was reorganized again, this time being called the Sawyer-Massey Company.

 Like the Emerson-Brantingham and J. I. Case threshers here in Stuhr Museum's exhibit, this Sawyer-Massey model was used to separate the edible part of grain from the rest of the plant. Before the development of the threshing machine, farmers and their families or hired hands usually crushed the grain plants (hay, chaff, and kernels) on the floor of their barns or on a specially created indoor or outdoor threshing floor.
 The farmers, family members, and hired hands would stomp on the grain themselves, walk animals on top of the grain, or beat the grain with a flail to loosen the chaff from the kernels. Taking advantage of the breeze to separate the straw from the rest of the grain, they swept up the remaining grain to be further processed in a fanning mill or through winnowing which separated the chaff from the kernels. This was time-consuming and tiring work.
 With the development of threshing machines, the time spent separating the kernels from the rest of the grain plant was significantly shortened. Instead of hauling the cut and bundled grain to the barn to be separated, the thresher could be hauled out into the field along with a steam engine or tractor. As the whole grain plants were carried to the thresher in wagons, the farmers or hired hands pitched the grain plants onto a conveyor at one end of the machine. Powered by the steam engine or tractor, the thresher's conveyor carried the grain plants into the thresher body where it first separated the straw from the chaff and kernels. The thresher then loosened and separated the kernels from the chaff, emptying the kernels into a wagon to be taken to market, and emptying the rest of the plant into a pile to be used as fodder, to be composted into the ground, or to be burned.

Notes

You can access a longer narrative of the Sawyer & Massey Company's history, compiled by Roy Botterill, on a Smokstak thread here.