ALTAMONT — The men who run the Antique Farm Machinery Museum at the Altamont Fair all love machines. And history.

Last Thursday afternoon at the machinery museum on the still-empty fairgrounds, Everett Rau of Altamont, who turns 96 this month, was talking with the other volunteers about where they would be able to find, by fair time, fresh-cut grain at this time of year. They will need it in order to demonstrate the early 19th-Century machine known as a separator, which replaced the work of hand-flailing the grain and chaff away from the straw.

“I lit the match,” said Rau, “but these guys built the fire.” Asked what he meant, he said, “I do all the talking, and they do all the work.”

The separator has been tucked over in the back corner of the barn for years now, according to volunteer Andy Tinning.

Rau said that this spring he had explained the tool’s significance to the group and suggested they get it working, and the other men had quietly set about making that happen. This year will be the first that this machine will be among those demonstrated at the fair.

“They’ve got the thing running now,” Rau said. “They figured out all the problems.”

Well, almost all.

Next up, he said, they will need to figure out, again before the fair starts, how to get the machine moving faster, so that it will succeed in rubbing the chaff from the straw.

Rau loves this particular machine because it represents a link between ancient times and the present. It was the first machine that freed farmers from centuries of hand-flailing — which had been done since ancient times — and opened the door to more mechanized means of removing the grain and chaff from straw.

In earlier times, Rau said, a man would need to do this in one of two ways: With the wind blowing through a building, he could pour the fresh grain and chaff from one bucket to another, and let the wind do the work; or he could set the grain and chaff into a big winnowing basket and “toss it up in the air and drop it quick, so that the wind would blow the chaff away.”

Either way, it did not allow one man to do work on a large scale.

The separator at the fair, which dates from about the 1820s, is about eight to 10 feet long. At one end is an opening, where grain that has been cut and dried in the field is fed in. Inside, the grain is caught between a rotating cylinder that has stationary pins jutting from it and another set of stationary pins.

This movement passes the grain through while also rubbing the grain and chaff off the straw. The grain and chaff fall to the ground through holes at the bottom. The straw, meanwhile, is slowly pushed along the long tray by a series of diagonal fingers on wooden slats that rise up slightly and shuffle it back, while shaking it to get additional kernels of grain to drop off. 

Originally the separator would have been powered by a horse on a horizontal treadmill, and the treadmill box is still positioned right next to it, hooked to it by a belt. At the fair, the whole assemblage will be run by an electric motor, for demonstration purposes.

Before the separator was invented, one man flailing straw by hand could only hope to gather about eight or nine bushels of grain in a day, at most. But with this machine, Rau said, “I don’t know exactly what the capacity is, but I know it would be 10 or 20 times that, at least.”

This was important, Rau said, because, in this period, farmers needed to feed not only their own families, but the manufacturers, merchants, and doctors who had left a life of farming for other professions. Mechanization had become essential.

Other machines that Rau showed off with pride include the bone grinder, used to crush raw bones that would be fed to chickens that, with industrialization, had started to be housed in coops and who needed the extra calcium; their shells had started to thin when they lost the nutrients they had previously gotten from free-range grazing.

Another is the reaper-and-binder, which replaced the scythe and the scythe-and-cradle. The machine cuts the grain, lifts up a measured amount, ties a knot around it, and drops three or four bundles at once that are then ready to be stacked in shocks to dry.

There is also a swing butter churn in the barn, with a sign on it noting that it would have been powered either by “gas engine or dog power.” The dog needed for this would have been a “strong dog,” Rau said. And he has the treadmill in the barn too, that a dog would have used — very similar to, but smaller than, the horse treadmill.

Rau hopes to see a lot of local families stop by the museum during the fair. “We’ll be here rain or shine,” he says. He likes nothing better than to pass on his enthusiasm about the past to children, who can carry it with them into the future.