Thanksgiving a time to celebrate the harvest

This photograph from 1914 shows a steel-wheeled Moline tractor supplying leather-belt-driven power to a threshing machine on a farm in northern Sussex County. It’s a reminder that Thanksgiving is a holiday with roots in the autumn harvest which helped provide food for the winter. Sussex farmers continue to get in this year’s crops, hampered somewhat by the extraordinary amount of rain that’s fallen on the county this year. Threshing machines like the one pictured here helped automate the process of separating small grains like wheat from straw.