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ITEM 3 · THE COURSE BEFORE THE TRACTOR, AT PRACTICE STRENGTH
Before the tractor came the steam age's own machine system — the traction engine, the separator, and the threshing ring that owned them jointly and moved them farm to farm — and its Walkerton course is a practice, not a manufacture. The threshing ring was Lincoln Township's harvest institution in the generation Farms & Agriculture's experimental-farm era covers: a neighborhood company of farmers, an engine and a separator worked as a circuit, the harvest social order built around the crew's arrival — the practice the county histories describe for this valley's townships and the world the tractor dissolved farm by farm. The works test runs with it: no threshing-machine, separator, or traction-engine manufacturer is recorded in Walkerton in any canvass — the machines came from the region's works and the national makers, through the implement houses (Houser's; Place's branch; the hardware trade of Businesses), and the town's own machine talent, as with automobiles, ran to the repair bench. The steam memory that outlives the practice — the engine as festival object — belongs to the culture article below and prints there at boundary size; the ancestor article's finding is the same shape as the headline's: this ground used the steam age's machines communally and built none of them, and the ring itself, the social machine, is the ancestor the farms' own file keeps.
Principal sources: Farms & Agriculture (the farm ground and its era); the county histories' threshing practice; the directory canvasses (no machine works of the class).