News
Editorial: Lansford: A trip through time
Tyler Ohmann
06/26/2012
This past weekend I traveled back in time. Now before everyone thinks I’m crazy, let me explain. I attended the Lansford Threshing show on the western edge of Bottineau County for the first time this past weekend, and spending a couple hours there sent me back to a simpler time.
So, I didn’t really time travel, but I was reminded of a time when life was much simpler, but for me it was on even more than one level.
Level one time travel
The first level of time travel I experienced this weekend was the same one that anyone else who went to Lansford experienced this weekend. At the threshing show one gets to experience the sights and sounds of days gone by—history in action. It is like being at a real life museum. Old tractors, motors and machinery fire up. Men in overalls wander around with straw hanging out of their mouths, and crowds get to see blacksmithing done like in the old days.
It is a chance for all ages to see how life was back when North Dakota was much younger, much more wild and being tamed by homesteaders, ranchers and pioneers.
While these machines may have been in their simplest forms, life back then was far from simple. The perfect example is the threshing display, which is a huge system of belts, pulleys and pure design genius. While today combines do all the work that a threshing machine did in a fraction of the time, it is still an invention far ahead of its time. While many farmers were still doing things by hand or with the help of horses, ox or simpler tractors. Threshers came and completely reinvented the game.
The threshing show in Lansford is a great way for those who were unable to live through the past to experience it firsthand, and for those who did, to re-experience some of it.
Time travel: Level two
Now for me, there was a whole other level of time travel for me on this expedition, because as a kid myself I was able to attend an event very similar to Lansford.
In my hometown of Albany, Minn., more than 400 miles southeast of Lansford, there is a tradition very similar to Lansford’s, with a threshing show too.
Albany’s ‘Pioneer Day’s’ has been celebrated for nearly four decades and much akin to Lansford it involves threshing, a tractor parade, a blacksmith display and much more.
So, every September since I was a wee lad, I had been experiencing the same thing as kids coming to Lansford have experienced, which kind of tickles me.
It is strange to think that even a state away that the areas in the midwest were settled in the same way, and that they are celebrated the same way as well.
While Pioneer Days is a bit grander scale than Lansford’s show, I still was transported back to when I was little kid this past weekend when entering Lansford. I traveled back more than a decade to when I ran around with my friends exploring the frontier, hearing the put-put of old engines, smelling the strong odors of tractor exhaust and watching the wheat explode in and out of the threshing machine.
All of it took me back to a time in my youth.
Whichever level (or both) of time travel one experiences at the Lansford threshing show is a worthwhile and nostalgic experience.
I remember being mystified, surprised and having fun all at the same time. On top of all this events like these teach kids without them even realizing they are learning. It is a real-time history lesson without the drabness of a text book or the monotone of a lecture.
I recommend that anyone who can spare the time, which is hard nowadays, make the trek to Lansford next summer and become a time traveler too.
History is always worth celebrating, recreating and Lansford is a fine example of it.