Old harrow first item in new museum building

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VOLGA – A steel-spiked wooden harrow sold in Brookings about a century ago is now an unusual wall hanging and a valued vintage farm implement in the county’s newest museum. 

Although it was made in Madison, Wisconsin, by the Boss Company, it probably came with “some assembly required,” which was the responsibility of Frank Sherwin’s Brookings implement business that sold the item.

Sherwin probably never imagined it would be the first item installed in the recently completed Trygve A. Trooien Horse-Drawn Museum that’s now a part of the Brookings County Museum complex in Volga’s City Park.

The harrow was first in the new structure because its unusual size and shape required it be hung on the building’s 12-foot high rough-sawn, one-inch thick pine board walls to save museum floor space for other more traditional horse-drawn items. 

The harrow and its four-horse hitch are in remarkably good condition considering their age and long career breaking up clods and smoothing out newly plowed Brookings County fields.

The harrow was touted in the March 2, 1916, Brookings Register by the Frank Sherwin Manufacturing Co. as The Pulverizer. Now it’s something of a repurposed wall hanging, and rather artfully displayed as well.

The Boss company claimed a boy could easily handle the four draft horses and the intricacies of field work bends and turns, and that the Pulverizer could break up dirt clods and smooth out 54 acres of fields to a depth of seven inches every day of the week.   

That Wisconsin firm apparently partially constructed its wooden harrows and then shipped them to dealers. One of those dealers was Frank Sherwin Manufacturer in Brookings, which was actually more a dealer than a manufacturer, although in advertisements Sherwin implied that he made various farm implements. 

While a “manufacturer” would be a stretch for the Brookings businessman, he was an inventor of farm items, and was granted United States patents in the early 1900s for improvements on steel harrow spikes. 

The original Brookings County owner of the harrow is unknown. 

It was donated to the museum years ago by Volga Postmaster Victor Dalthorp. In his lifetime, he acquired a plethora of historic items, and before the veteran of the Spanish-American War died, he willed his large collection to the county museum.

The Pulverizer now on the museum wall has withstood well the ravages of time and heavy use and is still good shape. It was the type of wheel-less farm implement that couldn’t easily be transported on roads because the 90 seven-inch steel spikes would have “pulverized” what passed as byways in those early Dakota days. 

So the rig probably spent a good share of its life unsheltered among the weeds by the side of the field hosting grasshoppers and providing shade for coyotes while waiting until the next planting season rolled around. 

Its new home in the $150,000 museum was made possible by a gift of $100,000 in the form of a bequest from the late Brookings County farmer-historian Trygve A. Trooien, Oak Lake Township. The museum’s many friends and benefactors stepped up to provide gifts for the final one-third of the cost.

The new museum will feature farm equipment and conveyances powered by draft horses.  

Brookings County Museum board members and volunteers are presently moving its herd unique herd of four fiberglass horses, Molly, Jip, Pet and Tiny, and horse-drawn equipment into the building.

Joining the Boss Pulverizer are various items like the usual plows, planters, cultivators, mowers along with rarities such as a two-board wagon on sled runners for work in the snow, the late Mel Thorne’s one-of-a-kind South Dakota Centennial covered wagon, and the very rare old Bruce rural route mail wagon that’s hitched and harnessed up to Jip and Molly.

The museum will have a grand opening next spring at a date to be announced.