c. 1920s J. I. Case Threshing Machine

 This threshing machine – sometimes called a thrashing machine, thresher, or separator – was made by the J. I. Case Threshing Machine Company of Racine, Wisconsin. Like the Sawyer-Massey and Emerson-Brantingham threshers here in Stuhr Museum's exhibit, this Case 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.
 To get a feel for the look and the sound of a running thresher, you can view a 52 second video here.
 This Case thresher has five faded but still readable patent dates printed on it, including:
May 2, 1899, which probably corresponds to patent 624333, which you can view here;
January 9, 1900, which corresponds to patent 640997, which you can view here;
November 27, 1906 and November 5, 1907, for which we have not found corresponding patents; and
December 23, 1919, which corresponds to patent 1325691, which you can view here.

 Beginning production of threshers in the 1840s, Jerome Increase Case created a company that would continually be on the leading edge of not only the thresher market but also the tractor and other farm implement markets over the decades. In 1904, for example, Case's company was the first to announce that its threshers would be all steel, a change that caused a bit of a stir at the time. When the advantages of steel became apparent – the steel threshers weathered better than the wooden ones and did not catch fire like the wooden ones – many of the threshing machine companies were producing steel threshers within a few years. When Stuhr Museum's Case thresher was made – probably in the 1920s – the threshing machine was already being used less and less, gradually being replaced by the combine harvester, a machine that essentially combined the actions of a reaper and a thresher. By 1930, the end of the thresher's run as one of the most important tools on the farm was drawing near. Despite the thresher's decline, Case continued to build them until the early 1950s.

Notes

A great source for Case products, including the threshing machines, is C. H. Wendel, 150 Years of J. I. Case (Iola, WI: KP Books, 2005).