Spotlight on the Collection - Harvesting Tools

As we enter into the busy season of harvesting, the Museum decided it would be a great time to shine our spotlight on the vast number of harvesting tools within our collection. Not only do we have hand harvesting tools for corn and wheat, which most of us think about this time of year, but we also have hand tools for harvesting ice, logs, honey, syrup, and many other riches found here in McLeod County.

Another important tool that we tend to forget about for harvesting, are oxen and later horses, used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The use of these animals lessened the load of human labor and with their use came inventive tools to control them. All the tools that made working with these beasts of burden possible are also present in the Museum's collection and we will have them on display as well.

These harvesting tools, although now antiquated and extremely labor intensive, were once revolutionary inventions that changed the way farming was done. The Museum will present our collection of harvesting tools, along with a time line of harvesting technologies that changed the way farmers harvested their crops. These innovations ultimately lead to the highly mechanized way we harvest today in the twenty-first century.