On July 28, 1892, Daniel Guengerich, a 52-year-old tenant farmer from northeastern McLean County, headed into his field atop a horse-drawn self-binding reaper, a machine that cut grain with a sickle bar and then bound the shocks with twine. With the weather relatively cool for late July, Guengerich told his wife Elise he’d be out late mowing a stand of what was probably winter wheat. Yet when he didn’t return after a rainstorm, she went looking for him.

Elise entered the field and followed a meandering, mown path through the wheat until she came upon the horse team and reaper, and, not far away, the lifeless body of what was left of her husband. Something must’ve put a scare into the horses, and as they jerked or bolted Guengerich was thrown backward into the “rapidly vibrating” sickle. “The unfortunate man was cut, sawed, mangled and mutilated in a sickening manner,” reported The Pantagraph.

Farm life in the 19th and early 20th century was occasionally punctuated by sudden, violent death, and such accidents were a fact of life when working the soil, handling beasts of burden or operating new-fangled machines. Although we would like to think that Corn Belt farming, especially in the sepia-toned pre-tractor days, was a relatively peaceful — even serene — endeavor practiced amid bucolic surroundings, a thresher or kick from a mule could extinguish a life in a heartbeat.