The Mouse Brigade

 

I was a charter member of the Robinson Brothers branch of "The Mouse Brigade".  The Robinson Brothers were a farming partnership made up of my dad and his two younger brothers.  There was also a second partnership that involved my grandfather and his farm called C.G.Robinson and Sons.  It won't be clear for many readers just what the Mouse Brigade was about until I explain something about farming during my childhood and youth. Specifically, I need to talk about corn and how harvesting and storing corn was once done compared with how it is done today.  

Corn is a member of the grass family and is a native American plant that was first cultivated around 7000 years ago in the area of Mexico or Central America. For almost all of that 7000 year period corn was harvested by hand. The ears were pulled off the stalk and the grain (seeds) were removed from the cob only when it was time to make food.   Around 100 years ago farmers started using mechanical means to harvest corn and the ears were then stored on the farm in buildings known as corn cribs until it was time to either feed it to livestock or sell it. Some amount of it was also consumed by the farmer and his family in the early days but by the time mechanical corn pickers arrived the vast majority was sold off the farm if not consumed by livestock.  I do remember my dad would plant a short row of popcorn which we kept for our own use over the winter.  We also planted some sweet corn which we used during the summer fresh out of the field.  

Early in history corn was stored in baskets and most of it was consumed by those who grew it.  Soon after their arrival here in America corn began to be grown by the Europeans after they learned about it from the natives. 
Eventually, enough was grown and harvested by those early settlers that they needed something more than baskets to store their harvest and that is when corn cribs came about.  The first were log or split log affairs and often had no roof.  They were built with gaps between the logs to allow air to circulate through the stored corn.  That corn was always stored on the cob. By the time the 20th Century rolled around corn cribs had become more thoughtfully constructed out of better or at least more finished material.  Often they were built as double cribs with an alleyway between the two cribs for storing machinery, all under a single roof.  Sometimes a corn crib was built into a barn or attached to a barn with or sometimes without a covered alley between the barn and the crib for storage. A crib inside or next to the barn was an especially popular option if much of the stored corn was going to be fed to cattle or pigs over the winter.  

From about 1866 when the government first began estimating corn production information to about 1940 average corn yields in the U.S. were around 36 bushels per acre.  Between the rapid adoption of hybrid corn varieties, plus the increased use of fertilizer and pesticides the average yields of corn have increased rapidly since the 1940s to averages just under 200 bushels per acre.  Those increased amounts of production required much greater storage capacity on the farm and for the next 25 years Additional and larger corn crib space was added to many farms.  Cribs were built of cement block, brick, metal, or wire.  During the 1960s round wire cribs with metal roofs were popping up all over rural America. 

Many of these wire cribs were constructed during the 50's and 60's

Double Crib with alley for equipment storage. 

Farmers could no longer consume even a fraction of what they were growing and unless they had very large livestock operations even that was not going to make a dent in the crop.  The 30 year period from 1940 to around 1970 was a time of tremendous change in corn farming.  By the late 1960s many farm families had replaced mechanical com pickers that harvested ear com with combines that harvested and shelled the kernels off the ear in the field.  The corn cribs that had been used for ear corn needed to be remodeled or new storage systems used. Corn cribs, once a common sight, are disappearing or converted to other uses.     

Let me back up to the years when we were still using tractor mounted corn pickers and storing ear corn.  That brings me to my memory of the "Mouse Brigade".   Robinson Brothers did not have a large livestock operation so our corn was not used for that.  When it came time to sell our corn at one of the local grain elevators we hired a custom corn shelling crew.  They would arrive with a corn sheller that was either mounted on the back of a truck or some models were towed behind a tractor.  Eventually, Dad and his brothers purchased their own corn sheller and did their own corn and that of some neighbors.  The adults and high school boys hired to help did the heavy work, scooping or raking corn out of the bottom of the crib into a conveyor that carried the ear corn up and into the sheller.   Inside the sheller, the ear corn was shelled and the shelled corn was run out of an auger spout into a truck or wagon. The sheller separated cobs and husks.  The husks were blown out of a canvas tube by a very large powerful fan.  They pointed the tube away from those working and the shucks and the occasional piece of cob were blown into large piles and then usually burned The cobs came out a different place and those were either just piled up and burned or loaded into wagons or trucks to be taken away.  I think a lot of times the cobs were just piled up and burned along with the husks. Sometimes I believe cobs were used for bedding material for livestock.   

Cob pile 

As you might expect corn cribs were popular places for animals to visit, and many took up permanent residence, mostly mice and rats, but sometimes we would find a raccoon or Squirrel, or sometimes a snake would be found.  Snakes were attracted to the cribs due to the abundance of mice and rats.  

 As the corn was moved out of the crib the mice and rats kept trying to move out of harm's way.  Initially, they did not try to leave the crib but just moved deeper into the corn pile. Eventually though, their cover was reduced to only a few bushels of ear corn back in a corner and they would make their escapes out of the cribs.  Those escaping rodents were the job of the Mouse Brigade, and we took that work seriously.   Toward the end, when there was only a small pile of ear corn left to scoop out the mice would come out in droves, or so it seemed to us.  We were using shovels, snow shovels, brooms, or just stomping them with our Davy Crockett boots.  At some of the places where we shelled corn there were also dogs involved in the Mouse Brigade.  I recall us shelling corn at the Biddle farm west of Brookston and they had a big old farm dog of unknown breed and that dog was an excellent mouser.  He was pretty fast and he did not waste time simply killing a mouse, there was one chomp and the mouse went right down the hatch and he would grab another.  That was the only dog I ever saw who could eat so many mice, without ever chewing them, but I suppose he could be much more efficient by not wasting time chewing up what he killed.   Once in a while, a rat would run out of the crib, but more often they were spotted by those working inside the crib and were dispatched while still in the crib.  You always knew when a rat had jumped out from under the corn because there was enough yelling coming from inside you could hear it over the roar of the sheller.  As we got older we graduated from the mouse brigade to scooping corn while younger family members were introduced to the mouse brigade.  That didn't last long because about that time we bought a combine and quit storing ear corn and not long after that the sheller was sold.   There were two wire cribs on our farm, one crib in a barn and another crib attached to another barn with an alley between the end of the barn and the crib. Those are all gone now. 

 

John Deer 720 Diesel tractor and Minneapolis Moline Corn Sheller circa 1959. 
To see a sheller in operation: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1588822327966213