A piece of agricultural history has returned to the area, much to the delight of Legacy of the Plains Museum representatives and the family whose ancestors brought it to the area nearly a century ago.
An operational Holt 1919 combine that was purchased new by Banner County farmer Hans ‘Ole’ Olsen, and restored two decades ago by a Rapid City, South Dakota man, was delivered to the museum in Gering last Thursday.
For Grandson Butch Schuler, it was an emotional return, saying “It’s a piece of not only our family’s history, but a part of the area’s history and how ground was broken up in the early 1900s and developed and farming practices have changed and we’ve adapted technology. And this represents a big part of that, a self-propelled combine.”
Schuler said prior to buying two of the combines and extending the heads an extra four feet, his grandparents used 32 horse teams to bring in the harvest, and many changes were taking place at the time.
“It evolved to using to using oil pull rumbling tractors to break sod and then into to crawler tractors. And then they had harvest machines that were stationary and to have a mobile harvesting platform was quite revolutionary,” Schuler said.
Schuler said just like today, it was a necessity for farmers of the early 1900s to figure out how to use evolving technology to maximize their crop yields. “They were able to break out ground and almost pay for that ground in one year with that crop, but they couldn’t do it without the technology,” he said. “It’s the same things that face us today, as we invest in technology and try to figure how to afford it, we can’t afford not to adapt.”
The background of the combine is well-known from the time it was originally shipped by Union Pacific Railroad to Kimball for pick up and taken to Banner County. After it was last used in the 1920s in the Alliance area, it sat buried from the dust storms of the 1930s until Bob Grimm salvaged it in the 1980s. In the late 1990s, Grimm began rebuilding it, replacing all of the wood that had rotted away, and after restoration was complete in 2002, he used it to combine five acres of grain a year later.
“My hat’s off to the Grimm family who restored this and were able to preserve it,” said Schuler. “And now that it’s being brought back to the to the Legacy of the Plains Museum, who will preserve it for future generations to enjoy and just what it represents of the the history of Western Nebraska and the farming industry here.”
