The ancestor, part two: steam traction and the threshing era

1865 – 1905, as dated in the record

The engines came from elsewhere: No Fort Wayne firm built steam traction engines in the record reached. The maker lists seat Indiana's engine builders at Richmond (Gaar, Scott & Co. and Robinson & Co.), La Porte (the Rumely companies and Advance), Columbus (Reeves & Co.), and Mount Vernon (Keck-Gonnerman) — Gaar-Scott, the name the era is usually told by, is Richmond's story and is given exactly this line here. The point is visible as early as 1865: the portable engines the Chicago Tribune named in the power department of that year's state fair in Fort Wayne were out-of-town machines, from a Richmond maker and from Lane & Bodley of Hamilton, Ohio, shown alongside this city's own threshers and reapers.

Fort Wayne's steam work, at true size: The city built steam power of the stationary kind, and parts for the moving kind. Bowser & Story, iron founders and machinists, advertised steam engines, mills, and plows in the 1864–65 directory — engines for mills and shops, not traction engines for the road. A generation later, E. B. Kunkle & Co. of Fort Wayne appears in the index of Rohan's Young Engineer's Guide (1895) among the makers of engine fittings, its safety valves illustrated in a handbook carried by the engineers who ran traction engines. Fort Wayne's documented place in the steam economy was components and stationary power; the traction engine itself was bought in.

The threshing era on the county's farms: The rig — an engine, a separator, a water wagon, and a crew — moved from farm to farm through the harvest, and the work was done by custom threshermen and neighborhood rings that pooled labor and shared the machine's cost. Allen County's named man in the record is George W. Stout of Hoagland, who, the 1905 History of the Maumee River Basin records, "operated threshing machines during the successive seasons" — the county's threshing done as a trade, season after season. Stout's second act belongs to the trade section below: in 1905 he went into the implement business in Fort Wayne. The era he worked in ended when the gasoline tractor and then the combine took the rig apart — the tractor first by belting to the same separators the steam engines had run, then by pulling the harvest in itself.

Sources:

1. The standard traction-engine manufacturer lists — Indiana's builders at Richmond, La Porte, Columbus, and Mount Vernon; no Fort Wayne builder.
2. Chicago Tribune, report of the Indiana State Fair held at Fort Wayne, September 1865 — the portable engines in the power department from a Richmond maker and from Lane & Bodley of Hamilton, Ohio.
3. Williams' Fort Wayne Directory, 1864–65 — Bowser & Story's advertisement as iron founders and machinists making steam engines, mills, and plows.
4. J. V. Rohan, Young Engineer's Guide (Racine, 1895), index of illustrations — E. B. Kunkle & Co., Fort Wayne, Indiana, under Fittings.
5. History of the Maumee River Basin (1905) — George W. Stout of Hoagland "operated threshing machines during the successive seasons."