As the sun moved higher in the sky on an unseasonably warm October day, trucks pulling horse trailers with draft horses or hauling farm machines from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, along with vehicles filled with friends, neighbors and farm families, pulled into Larry and Judy Bergquist’s farmstead for a threshing event west of Wing.
“We’ve had a threshing event for years – not every year, but many years. Our last threshing was four years ago. We tried to have one last year, but we got a storm here and the oats kind of blew down, so that makes it hard to bind,” Larry Bergquist said. “We just like it. I did it when I was a kid. I used to miss grade school – a whole week of school – to go help with threshing with my dad and uncles.”
Bergquist remembers that the threshing events as a kid were not only a work event where everyone worked to cut, dry, and thresh the grain crop, but they were also a social event where everyone gathered in groups, visited, and ate homecooked food.
Threshing was one of the last times of the year before winter set in that friends and neighbors would get together. It brought good memories for Bergquist and became “kind of a disease that got in my blood that they can’t get out.”
“It was such a good get-together when I was a kid, because all the uncles and neighbors got together and they worked together and made it fun. The ladies cooked for all the threshers; the eats were unbelievable, and the guys were all playing jokes on each other and it was just a fun time,” he said. “We wanted the event to continue so my kids and grandkids could experience it, too.”
The Bergquist family has farmed in the Regan-Wilton area for multiple generations, with Bergquist’s paternal grandfather, Grandpa Bergquist, immigrating from Sweden and farming north of Regan. His maternal grandfather, Grandpa Johnson, came from Wisconsin and farmed near Wilton.
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