This photograph, titled "Threshing Rig, Nichols and Shepard 1903," shows a threshing crew with their new steam tractor made by the Nichols and Shepard Company of Battle Creek, Mich. Behind it is a threshing machine of unknown manufacture that separated small grains from their stalks in harvesting.

Traction steam engines were first marketed in the United States in 1873. No matter which company built them, they shared certain characteristics. Each had an engine consisting of a cylinder, piston, valves, boiler, governor, flywheel, traction gears, wheels and firebox. The fire in the firebox converted the water in the boiler to steam, which passed through a series of mechanisms that powered the tractor. By the 1890s a large machine, such as the one pictured, was often owned by an entrepreneurial farmer who hired an itinerant crew to work his machine on neighborhood farms, or by many farmers banding together as a cooperative to share the labor and equipment expense.

It is not known who owned this tractor and threshing machine.