| Description |
The Marriott-Slaterville City History Collection was created by the residents of the town to document their history. The collection includes Autobiographies, Oral Histories, History of Marriott, History of Slaterville, and the History of the Merging Townships to create Marriott-Slaterville City. This information has left behind rich histories, stories and important information regarding the history of the Marriott-Slaterville area. |
| OCR Text |
Show August 3, 1999 Local farmers toil for Weber County Fair demonstration By CHARLES R TRENTELMAN Standard-Examiner staff MARRIOTT-SLATERVILLE-The men pushed and nudged and wrenched and grumbled. The machine they were tending went "clank" and "rumble" and "ka-CHUG" and "tink!" And out spat one small bundle of oats. Then the machinery did it ? again. And again. Pretty soon the field was dotted with neat tied bundles of oats. Other men stacked the bundles in piles called shocks. The sun got hot, the men started to sweat. This was how they did it in the "good old days," they said. Those fine magical sunny days when life was simple, candy bars were a nickel and it apparently took half a dozen men two days in the broiling sun to cut 50 acres of oats. Of course, in the good old days they didn't have a neighbor off to the side saying: "I've got my combine right over there. I could do this whole thing in about an hour!" The neighbor was ignored. The oat harvesters are members of Great Basin Antique Machinery, a group of guys who collect, restore and use the kind of farm machinery their fathers had. And they were getting ready for the Aug. 12-14 Weber County Fair, where they will be displaying, and using, some of their machinery. They were cutting oats with it this morning because one of the things they want to demonstrate at the fair is an old fashioned thresher, a machine that separates oats from straw. Farmers now use a combine to do both the cutting and threshing in one operation. But 60 years ago, they were separate jobs. To use a thresher you need unthreshed oats, which you don't just go buy at the feed store. You have to find, cut and HOT DAY: Don Gill wipes the sweat from his brow as he works in temperatures in the 90s. bind a field of oats the old- fashioned way. The machines they had were a 1931 John Deere tractor and a 1937 John Deere binder. Club member Marty Simonson said he could remember having to do 500 acres using the same ma- chines when he was a kid in Missouri. He hated it then, he said, but smiled as he watched the machines working this morning. "There's a lot of nostalgia Oats raised on the Joe Deru farm on 2100 West in Marriott-Slaterville City were harvested by these men with the same equipment for the County Fair in August 2000. _ |
