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The Work of Our Hands (photos above & right) Threshing, c1905 with men, boys, dogs, and one little girl assembled in a period portrait of farm labour. Gathering for the threshing retained the flavour and purpose of pioneer "bees" when rare and generally unaffordable mechanized equipment was hired out around the community. Good machines had a capacity of 500 bushels a day and could be amortized in a few years. Steam powered threshers first made their appearance in Upper Canada in 1861. The picture includes: A. Goold; A. Cutcliffe with daughter Constance (left wagon); Trevor Goold (boy with white hair, left); Ernest Goold (in fedora beside team with load); A. Liscombe (holding horses). It is evident from the clothes who was working and who was there just for a photo opportunity. The threshing gang would gather the sheaves and bring them to the threshing machine by horse-drawn wagons, where a conveyor belt would feed the sheaves into the threshing machine, separating the grain from the straw. The grain was stored in the granary in the barn and the straw was blown into a large stack. All the while the men were hard at work threshing in the fields, their wives and daughters and mothers toiled inside preparing a meal of roasts, vegetables and pies for the hungry workers. The process would then be repeated again and again until the entire village had harvested its grain. But this did not end the labours of the wheat economy. One Mount Pleasant resident recalled "the days when Mount Pleasant was bigger than Brantford...where one could stand on the tailor's steps and see strings of sleighs hauling grain to the river boats, horses' noses to the