American Agriculture History Minute: Corn, and Corn Shelling

I’m Mark Oppold with an American Agriculture History Minute.

Corn of course holds a major part of American agriculture history, but very early on corn was typically shelled by hand and used for things like fuel for heating, fertilizer, of course cattle feeding, and bedding.

The process of shelling corn, though, was a community affair. Family and friends gathered at a shelling bee to fill buckets with kernels and toss the cobs into a pile. By the way, this process is where the old saying, “hands as rough as a cob”, was born.

Mechanical corn shellers were introduced in the 1800s as a means to simplify this whole process.

That’s today’s American Agriculture History Minute. I’m Mark Oppold. Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.