When Things Speak: The Beet Knife
Posted May 2nd, 2015 by NET
In the 1870s, thousands of Germans from Russia left Russia for the United States. By 1910, the US census counted 13,000 Germans from Russia in Nebraska alone. Diane Wilson says these new immigrants started transitioning to American life by continuing a lot of their own traditions, especially when it came to work. Wilson says she learned all this because of a tool in the historical society’s collection: a sugar beet knife.
TRANSCRIPT:
They’re really kind of sinister looking in a way. The blade is maybe a foot long? And then width-wise, I don’t know, three inches perhaps. But at the end of the blade, the far end of the blade, there’s this little hook. That’s the part that’s the most unusual.
It looks like a machete with a wooden handle, and then this funny little hook at the end. And I’ve heard a lot of stories about people cutting their fingers off when they were using them. So I started getting curious about what was that hook for?