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BY 1907 · HORSES TO TRACTORS AT THE RECORD'S STRENGTH
The township's mechanisation enters the record in one man's sketch: Edwin C. Laidlaw "operated one of the first steam threshers in St. Joseph county" (Howard, vol. 2, pp. 927–928) — steam threshing on Penn ground in the generation after the wheat height, the machine that turned the harvest from a neighbourhood of flails and horse-powers into a contracted service, worked by the same man who dealt thoroughbred stock for thirty years. The claim prints at its strength: "one of the first," in a son-of-the-house sketch, with no date and no maker's name, and the settler for the county's threshing course is named in the closing roll. Behind the thresher stands the horse order it began to displace, documented at trade strength in Businesses: the blacksmiths and wagon makers of 1839–1884, the livestock dealing, the harvest labour at 50 cents a day in Minnick's telling. Ahead of it, the tractor succession — the county counts at dated points that the checklist asks for — is South Bend's file's frame at pointer size; no Penn Township tractor, combine, or milking-machine date stands in any source, and the leg prints the succession as the record gives it: horses and steam documented, the gasoline age a named gap with the agricultural-census county tables and the implement dealers' records (the Crull brothers' line of 1916 is the township's implement trade at directory strength) as its settlers.
Sources:
- Howard (1907), vol. 2, pp. 927–928 (Laidlaw); Chapman (1880) and Polk, as cited in Businesses and the named-farms article.