Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 16.djvu/373



EARLY FARMING IN UMATILLA COUNTY 345

with a small horsepower, hand feed machine by William Court- ney. He threshed grain for Andrew Kilgore, Henry Hales, James Lieuallen, Taylor Green, Thomas Linville, D. A. Rich- ards and probably a few others. Some of this grain was cut by hand with a cradle, some cut with a mower and rake and some cut with a hand rake reaper.

THRESHING MACHINE APPEARS.

In 1871 a man by the name of Snyder, living at Wildhorse Grove, just above Athena, bought the Courtney threshing machine and ran it in the Weston country. In 1872 William Kilgore and Tom Fuson bought and operated a small horse- power hand-feed thresher. Prior to this date several small farms had been opened up in the foothills around Weston. In 1871-2 the first header operated by parties living in this vicinity was owned by J. W. Stamper, who had settled just north of the present town of Athena.

In the period between 1863-1870 the settlers were few and these few paid more attention to stock interests than grain, but it is a fact that Kilgore, Green, Lieuallen, Hales, Barrett, Linville, Royse and possibly a few others did grow and thresh grain during these years.

In 1865 Lafe Warmoth had 20 acres of sod broken on land adjoining the City of Weston and planted to corn. Warmoth gave Taylor Green a pack mule to plow the 20 acres of sod and the planting of the corn was done by using an ax to cut the sod, dropping the corn by hand and covering same by the heel of the boot. Yet with this crude way of planting I am informed this field of corn made a satisfactory crop.

Many of the early settlers raised excellent fields of corn and demonstrated many years ago that corn would grow in this country.

In 1877 David Taylor raised corn, T. J. Kirk in 1878 and the writer in 1882 planted and harvested a good crop of corn on 35 acres of ground two and one-half miles northeast of Weston.