In Drummond one will find a grocery store, two gas stations/convenience stores, a quilting store, three motels, two bars, three restaurants, plus a drive in. Amentiies include an impressive library, a health center, a bank & post office, fire department and ambulance as well as a senior citizens center.
One of those restaurants is Country Bumpkins, a nice cafe offering home style cooking. Around the diner are wagon wheels, wooden watering troughs, agricultural implements, a road grader, even an old McCormick Deering 10-20 Tractor. Beside the tractor are an old dump rake and this side delivery mower.
The side delivery mower was so named because its sickle bar (the "business end" of the machine) was to the side of the mower. It was mounted to the side so the grass/hay was not trampled by the tractor or horses before it was cut. This was the first implement to be passed over the field in the process of "making hay" for the coming winter. These mowers were ground driven, the entire mechanism which drove the sickle bar, which cut the hay/grass, being driven by the forward motion of the mower. As a result they were usually pulled by four horses, even though the mower itself was a pretty small implement. Of course, these mowers were later pulled by tractors and, still later, powered by the tractor's power take off (PTO). Use of PTO power greatly sped up the mowing process.
The open chain drive on this example suggest that this is a fairly early model, probably pre 1920, as the hay crop tended to wrap around the drive on occasion (causing a lot of blue air in the vicinity of the mower while the unfortunate farmer unwrapped the hay from the gears and chain), necessitating their being enclosed in later models. This is a model No. 5, but it is missing a few parts, most notably a cover which bears the name, McCormick Deering.
If one happens to be passing by on the July 4th weekend they may participate in the Kiwanis Bullshipper’s Rally & Rodeo, the town's biggest annual blowout. Next year (2017) will the the staging of the 74th annual rodeo. Drummond is in a predominantly agricultural area, so an annual rodeo is to be expected of a small town like Drummond. Up in the hills, both to the north and the south, the major activity until recent times has been silver mining, with old mines and ghost towns sprinkling the high country.
A long stone's throw north of the Clark Fork River, Drummond was, according to local legend, named for a trapper who operated a line of traps in the area and camped about where the railroad station now stands. The first camp at this site was established in 1871 and was called Edwardsville for John Edwards, a local rancher. It was renamed for trapper Hugh Drummond in 1883. When the post office was established in 1884 the name was shortened from Drummond Camp to Drummond.
