gQ -

The corn sheller you describe is fairly common in the antique shops around here. As you say, every farmer had one. They were essential for producing that treasure of the outhouse called the corncob.

They were used only on dried corn, mostly that intended for use as livestock feed, although some that you intended to grind for cornmeal might go through one. If the ears are allowed to dry on the stalk until the first hard freeze, they'll go through with relatively little cracking of the grain, although it's actually harder to "husk" dried corn than it is when the husks are fresh. For feed purposes, the sheller didn't actually break the corn up enough, so you'd still probably want to "crack" it for the livestock.

If you really wanted whole grains, as with popcorn, you'd hand-shell it by rubbing one ear against another - a process that's surprisingly quick once you get the knack.

For fresh corn for canning (actually little done in my area) there was a device consisting of a thin sheetmetal ring that you could supposedly slide down the ear and cut off the kernels. The problem is that you had to have one that matched the size of that year's cobs, and they worked so poorly that most people just used a knife - often after the corn was "blanched" by boiling briefly on the ear. These devices are usually labelled as "apple corers" in the antique shops because people don't know what they are - and that's their best guess. (I recently saw a new "apple corer" at one of the local discount stores that's a "dead ringer" for the antique corn earer, and my guess is that it wouldn't work much better on an apple than they did on corn.)

John