For three days every year the town of Rolag, MN,
hosts a popular gathering of serious steam wonks called the Threshers Reunion.
Anyone interested in how technology has changed society would be drawn to this collection of working agricultural equipment from around 1840 to 1950.
I was happy the sun shined occasionally on the day we visited Rollag. As you can see in the following pictures, the sky varies from clear blue to clouds at 100’
Each day the mobile equipment parades around Thresher Hill in the morning. Every piece gets reviewed in front of the bleachers. It can be a long parade.
We didn’t see every tractor but there were a number of behemoths like this red and green one.
This early excavator (below) could have been the model for the children’s book Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.
A Case tractor is parked here and installed as a power plant for a sawmill and a foundry.
I first visited Rolag in July 1976, off season for Thresher Hill. I saw a large collection of vintage machines on a 5 acre park in the middle of nowhere. Today the park is a 100 acre destination museum in the middle of nowhere dedicated to portraying family farm life in western Minnesota.
They claim to hold tight to traditional ways here, but I noticed lady engineers driving the locomotive.
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