Preparing for fall

Activities at Harkin Store

provide glimpse into the 1870s

By KURT NESBITT

Journal Staff Writer

WEST NEWTON -- Fall was a time when the early settlers made preparations for the approaching winter.

In that spirit, some local folks turned up at the Harkin Store on Sunday afternoon to demonstrate what those activities might have entailed around 1870.

The demonstrations are a regular program at the Harkin Store each fall, said Director Opal Dewanz.

Visitors learned how to make sauerkraut or apple cider or can vegetables or dry fruit or watch a farrier pound a red-hot piece of steel into a horseshoe.

"This would've been part of it but they also would've been making soap and threshing also," Dewanz said. "The butchering would've been done before Christmas."

On the front porch of the store stood Gerhard Bauer, Fritz Blauert and Otto Schenk behind a table. Together, the three men, all retired teachers, demonstrated the way a head of cabbage becomes a heap of fresh sauerkraut. Schenk cut the cabbage while Blauert shredded it into a medium-sized tub, which he periodically dumped into a large stone crock that Bauer kept stamping with a stick. They made 100 pounds of sauerkraut Sunday, which they will split up among themselves or sell at a church function later in the year.

Not too far away, Ken Huebert pressed Macintosh apples in an antique apple press. Huebert first started pressing apples six years ago when he decided to make use of the 20 apple trees in his back yard.

Even though the press was built around 1904, the method used to turn apples into cider is roughly the same as it was during the Harkin Store's heyday in the 1870s. It's simple: all the apples are washed before they're put into the grinder, which empties into a bucket below. That bucket is put underneath a screw, which is turned down as tight as possible, draining as much juice from the pulp as possible into a container at the bottom. The juice is strained once. Huebert says he also pasteurizes the cider before bottling it.

Canning fruit and vegetables is another old-fashioned method that has survived to modern times. Gloria Klinder of Minnesota Lake brought several examples, including canned white beets.

"I always bring something interesting," she said. "Otherwise it gets boring."

There isn't much difference between the 1870s and 2003 in the kinds of things that are canned or in the method of canning, Klinder said, except that the jars were different.

Dewanz points out that quite a bit of work was done to harvest corn and grains around the turn of the 19th century. On the side of the store, she posted copies of black-and-white photographs of grain stacks and threshing machines. In the days before combines and tractors and elevators, farmers often made grain shocks, threshed off the stacks, put it in grain sacks and hauled it to a granary, she said.

Fall in the 1870s was also a time to re-shoe horses. Farrier R. J. Gurska, Jr., turned a few bars of steel into horseshoes using a small forge, some tools and an anvil. He said a good blacksmith can usually create a horseshoe in about five minutes.

"I just believe everybody should see someone making a horseshoe," said Gurska, who also trims, balances and shods horses near Gibbon. "It's a wonderful tradition."