Many of the memories I have about the farm have to do with haying. There was always some excitement assoicated with haying, and interesting things happened then. For one thing, because Dad was desperate for help I suppose, it gave me the chance to drive a tractor when I was only 7 years old. There were other times when a truck partially crashed through the floor of the hay mow in an old part of the barn, almost getting a friend and me who were underneath. One of the summer kids, Volnee (sp?) Blodgett, let go of a hay wagon that he and Phil Cooley were supposed to be backing out the mow by hand, and the wagon nearly ran over Phil. Hay bales are also great for building forts anytime, and the hay mow was a constantly changing landscape, filling with hay in summer and slowly emptying to floors in winter. Later on, a used IH baler that constantly sheared a key pin when it was most critical drove Dad nuts, and brought a mechanic from Magalski's, the farm equipment dealer, up to try to fix it. That mechanic showed up 15 years later as my wife's grandfather. Who knew then?
My question to you: what do you recall about haying when you were kids, say teenage or less?
9 comments:
I'm learning - I guess I need to preview an entry in order to make sure what I'm saying makes sense. That's why the previous post got deleted. This is an edited version of the same one.
Even as a little kid, 25 years or so after the time you're describing, I recall haying always had a deadline intensity about it. Often, it was because it took the three-days for hay to dry, If it got wet during the drying process, before it made it into the barn, quality went down, sometimes to the point that it wasn't worth putting it away. In New England in June, 3 or 4 days of dry weather pushes the odds. So, if it looked like there might be a few good days, people would hay like crazy.
But when I was little, we had "Radio Vermont, WDEV in Waterbury" or Stuart Hall on channel 3. What sort of weather forecasting did farmers in the 20's and 30's get? Was there a radio, or just the paper? And if it was a paper, then in rural Vermont, I'm guessing it was the weekly Herald, and no daily was around. Weather forecasting had to be done by the farmers themselves, I'd think.
What was switchel, and where did the stuff to make lemonade and switchel come from? I remember Grandpa Cooley describing it as being brought to the field in ceramic jugs, wrapped with a wet cloth to keep it cooler.
How many horses did the farm have when you were a kid? In addition to the other chores, keeping them healthy and well-fed after a day of work probably took some time.
It's also important to mention that Uncle Ransom, the brother-in-law you're referring to, also grew up on a farm. Sometime, you may want to tell the story of how, when his father broke his leg you went over to help.
What excellent descriptions!
If you see some funny things about comments that have been deleted, that's because I did some funny stuff figuring out how to use the blog site. Anyway, I hope I have now got it right. We'll see.
I do think this is a great idea. I'll add something to the writings of Dan and Charles, once I figure out what it should be. Of course, it will be a girl's perspective and thus more about inside the house. Aside from picking berries and garden produce and just playing outside, we (Ruth and I) did much inside. More later.
I can answer Dan's questions about the drinks that were furnished to the men and boys doing the haying. Lemonade was made from real lemons,so we didn't make it very often, although our mother was ahead of her time as far as furnishing fresh fruit and vegetables. The switchel was made of cider vinegar, water, and sugar. Any drink was cooled by chipping off some ice from the icebox in the cellar. The ice is another entry sometime in the future. Anyway, it was often the job of one of the girls to carry the cold drink to the men in the field or the barn. In writing this comment I realize that much of the day of the women and girls was consumed by supplying large amounts of food for the men who needed it to provide energy for the hard work they did. I don't remember that anyone was fat!
I've pretty much forgotten how to add my comments to a blog, so I'm just going to assume that if I type it in this space, it will, through the mystery of the computer, find it's rightful place.
Charlie Cooley, my brother, has already given a pretty complete account of how haying got done when we were kids. My own experiences were not exactly the same as his, but they occurred within the same general framework. Being the youngest of the boys that spent very much time around the farm, I was the last to get involved in anything that would be called work, that is, what "the men" did. I didn't know enough to appreciate how much hard, dirty work I was spared. I think I can remember doing just about all the jobs that Charles wrote about, only a little later.
He mentioned that I was "good" with horses and, if I was, it was because I genuinely liked them. Our farm horses seemed to me to be gentle giants. Some of my fondest memories are of the times I got to work with them. I recall driving the "team" when "the men" were pitching on hay. There wasn't much to it except to stay as close as possible to the tumbles that were being pitched on. Sometimes it was necessary to turn the wagon 90 degrees or even 180 and that could not be done too abruptly. Whoever was loading the hay would be close at hand and always seemed to know before I got into too much trouble.
Charles's account of a near tragedy when he fell of the dump rake reminded me of a somewhat similar incident that happened to me. It was after we started using a hayloader which was a machine that hitched behind the wagon to lift the hay out of the windrows and deposit it on the wagon. Usually there were two men loading and someone to guide the horses along the windrow. On this occasion we were working in a field that had a wet area. I was driving and we had passed through this wet area before with no problem. This time, however, the wagon was almost fully loaded and the iron rimmed wheels started cutting through the sod and sinking in the mud. Whoever was loading yelled at me to keep going so I urged the horses to greater exertion. They leaned into the harness with a will. Then the evener snapped. I was standing on top of the load. When the evener let go, the horses lurched forward a few steps before they realized that they no longer had a load behind them. After all, I had been quite vociferous in urging them on. Before I knew what was happening, the reins jerked me off the load and I landed on my face in the mud that the horses had churned up in their efforts. Fortunately, I missed the wagon tongue so was not hurt. I remember being so fixated on keeping the horses under control that I kept hold of the reins while scraping the mud out of my eyes.
In case you haven't already figured it out, the evener is a heavy piece that is pinned to the wagon tongue just behind the horses. At each end is a somewhat lighter, shorter piece that the tugs, or traces, are hooked to. In front of the horses there is a neckyoke that holds up the front of the wagon tongue and keeps the wagon from overrunning the horses when it is going downhill. The evener that I am referring to was made of wood and it took a lot of force to break it. Ned and Jerry were big boys and when they leaned into the harness together, they could exert a lot of force.
More later. We are having a picnic this evening so I have to go start a fire.
Its been a long time since I contributed anything to this effort. As Dan mentioned, I agreed to do some political commentary for the local paper and it has turned out to be a very time consuming job. I don't write very fast, but the research takes a lot more time than the writing. If it weren't for the internet, I wouldn't be able to do it at all.
For this contribution, I want to pick up on Charles'description of haying - specifically, what happened when hay got so high in the bays that it could no longer be pitched off a wagon sitting on the barn floor. To start with, I'll try to describe the device we used.
There was a metal track that hung from the ridgepole of the barn. A sort of trolley ran on that track. A heavy rope (about one inch in diameter if I remember right) was attached to one end of the trolley, passed through two pulleys that hung below the trolley, then back over a pulley on the trolley and through a device that would lock the rope in place if it (the locking device) were closed. The rope then passed through the barn and through a pulley attached near the peak and then through a pulley that was anchored to the ground. The pulleys that hung below the trolley had hooks attached to them. A light line was attached to one of these hooks.
In use, the light line was used to pull the trolley to the end of the track on the downhill end of the barn. The peak of the barn extended beyond the end wall so the trolley was well past the end wall when it came to the end of the track. At that point, the locking device released the heavy rope and the pulleys hanging below the trolley dropped.
There was a big door in the downhill end of the barn that extended from the beam at the top of the wall to the roof peak. I'd guess it was about 10 feet wide. When it was closed, it hung from the track. It opened and closed by sliding in a rough wooden track on the wall. After hay could no longer be pitched off the wagons into bays, this door had to be lowered so that hay could be lifted off the wagons using the pulley and trolley device that I have described. It was a somewhat hazardous operation as so many other farm operations were.
First, a long ladder was raised from the barn floor to the track at the peak. Someone had to climb the ladder, attach a block and tackle to the track, remove the big pin that the door hung from when it was closed and attach the lower end of the block and tackle to a ring in the middle of the door. Our ladder was somewhat rickety and the weight of a big man would bend it enough so that the top might slip off the track. Charles was just the right size for the job so up he went. While the men on the barn floor used the block and tackle to take the weight off the pin, Charles slipped it out and the door was ready to come down. When the ring reached the beam at the top of the wall, a pry bar was inserted in it to keep the door from going any further down, and the pulley block hook was moved to the pin that had held the door suspended from the track. I think a piece of chain that was just the right length was attached to the beam and the ring in the door, then the pulley block was used to lower the door the rest of the way and the chain held it in place.
This operation fascinated me even though I was too small to participate. I was always anxious to get to this phase of the haying operation, because from this point on, I had an important part to play. I'll get to that next time.
I can't seem to remember how to identify myself except to write here that I am "Brother John."
To continue what I wrote last time, we used a variety of devices to pick up the hay from the wagon when it was being put in the barn through the big door. We called one such device "slings." It consisted of three ropes that were fastened to wooden pieces about 2 inches square and just a little shorter than the wagon was wide. Each sling was made up of two pieces. At each end of each piece, the ropes were gathered together. They were tied into a ring on one end and a catch on the other that could be released with a light rope. Three or four of these slings were built into each load of hay. The first was laid on the wagon before any hay was loaded, with the rings at each end and the catch in the middle. The line to release the catch had to be coiled carefully so that it would dangle when the hay was pulled up into the barn. A layer of hay was loaded on the first sling and then another sling was laid out on the first layer of hay and so on until the wagon was loaded.
At the barn, one of the pullies that dropped down from the trolley was hooked to the ring at each end of the top sling. When the signal was given, the horses at the other end of the barn were put in motion, the rope tightened, the two pulleys came together wrapping up the layer of hay that was on top of the sling. As soon as the pulleys came together, they started up with the hay suspended under them. When they got to the trolley, the lock on the trolley grabbed the rope at the same time the trolley was released from a catch at the end of the track. It then ran along the track until it was where the men in the mow wanted it to be. Then, if all had gone according to plan, and the light rope was dangling where it could be reached, it was given a yank and the hay fell out. If it wasn't within easy reach, there was much cursing and someone had to risk getting under the sling load of hay and pulling it loose without dumping the hay on top of himself. The trolley with the empty sling was then pulled back with the light rope and the process was repeated until the wagon was empty.
We also used a couple of different "forks." These were essentally grapples that were spread out and forced into the hay. When they were pulled up, the tines closed and grabbed a bunch of hay. The first one we had was very heavy and awkward and, if I remember right, it didn't take a very big bunch of hay. Later we had one that was lighter but worked better. I guess their advantage was that it was not necessary to build them into the loads. However, the load had to be built in more or less separate parts that made up forkfuls.
Enough for now. I seem to get much more wound up in descriptions of equipment and processes than I intend to when I start out.
Post a Comment