Making a Living in Elba

Robert Parish owned and operated the first store in Elba about 1884. It was a one-room portion of his home. Freight was hauled from Kelton, Utah, from Central Pacific railroad then by wagon team. In these days thousands of wagons passed between Albion, Elba, and Malta to Kelton, drawn by oxen, mules, and horses. The first mercantile store was a frame building owned by Thomas Taylor and George Hadfield. This was later replaced by a brick building, the Roy Eames Mercantile. freight was now hauled from Burley by truck. J. Roy Eames was owner of the Elba store except for a brief, unsuccessful ownership when the store was closed. It has since burned and only a handful of bricks mark the spot. Elba's first telephone was at the store where messages would arrive to be passed on to concerned parties. By 1917, a few families were connected to a telephone line installed be the Forest Service connecting Albion and Cold Spring Creek. Later a system in Elba using wall phones and a switchboard at the Edward Darrington home was used, with most calls going through an operator. It was a party line and neighbors often listened to keep abreast of the latest news. Homes were reached by a series of rings - longs and shorts - accomplished using a crank handle. The earliest telephones were battery-operated wall phones.

The first threshing machine was owned by John Darrington and Moroni Beecher and Robert Parish, arriving in 1892. These were horse powered machines using twelve head of horses. There were six sweeps spaced evenly around it. The horses were hitched to the sweeps and tied in such a way that they went around and around in a circle all day. In the center of this "horsepower" was a platform where a man stood with a whip in his hand to keep the horses on a uniform slow walk. A huge tumbling rod went from the power to the threshing machine. This transferred the power to the thresher and ran the gears that threshed the grain heads as the bundles of grain were fed into the machine. Six men operated this, one to drive horses, one to sack the grain as it came out of the auger into a one-half bushel container, one to cut the bands on the bundle, and one to feed bundles into the machine. The last two men were spelled off by the two extra men.

Grain was cut with binders. the grain was bound in stringed bundles and these were stacked eight or more in a group in what was called a shock. These were stacked all over the field of cut grain. When the straw was completely dried they were hauled and stacked in some centrally located place. the stacks were round and tapered at the top to shed rain. Besides the six machine men two were needed to stack the straw as it was blown out of the machine. Then the grain was hauled to granaries in wagons.

A threshing crew coming to a farm was a major event. Everyone worked fast and hard. The crews usually stayed about three days and it was up to the women to see that they were well fed during their stay. Later with the advent of gas engines, they were owned and operated by Joe Savage and Charley Ottley. A "feeder" on a crew had to be very skilled and careful as it was easy to get one's hands in the way of the machine's blades. Accidents were common.