MEMOIRS PART 10 - HAYING TIME

Until Dad began to grow corn, most of the farm was planted in alfalfa. He called it Lucerne (pronounced lú-sern). I believe that is the English name for alfalfa, which is the word his grandfather would have used, so that is the name he was accustomed to calling it. There was also a meadow of wild grass north of the Old Barn, bordering Piccadilly Street, and another meadow east of the farm on Jennings Lane. This was always known as "The Meadow"; I believe Uncle Les took this field as his part of grandfather's estate, and then lost all interest in the estate. Another area of wild grass meadows was found in the place we called "Fishing Creek".
The alfalfa was harvested for use as feed for sheep, dairy cows , and horses, while the wild grass was harvested to feed the beef cattle. The alfalfa produced three crops per year, and the wild grass produced one crop, usually in the early fall.

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The method of harvesting the alfalfa was first to mow it down, then to rake it into rows with a dump rake, where it was left to dry. Once properly cured, the alfalfa (hay) was raked into piles about as large as a man could lift into a hay wagon with a pitchfork. The hay was then hauled to the farmyard, where a derrick was used to hoist the hay up to the haystack.
The derrick was a wooden structure with a heavy base, about 20 feet square, and a vertical post about 20 feet high was mounted in the center of the base frame. The post was supported by diagonal timbers going from the top of the post to each corner of the base. At the top of the post, a 40 foot-long boom was mounted which could be rotated freely. 3/4 of the boom projected in front, tipped up at 45 degrees, so that the tip of the boom was about 60 feet above the ground.

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The short end of the boom was attached by another timber to the center post through appropriate metal fittings like large hinges, allowing the boom to turn about the post. The diagonal timbers limited the rotation of the boom to about 90 degrees. A steel cable went through pulleys up the post from the derrick's base to the boom, then along the boom to the long end, where the cable connected to the hay fork.

The hay fork was about the same size and shape as the scoop end of a bulldozer. Where the bulldozer scoop is solid, the fork had six or eight tines, and it had a latching mechanism so that it could close to grab a load of hay, an unlatch to dump the hay on top of the haystack. The cable that lifted the fork was attached near the derrick base to the harness of what we called the derrick horse. This horse was ridden or led by the derrick boy, which was me after the age of eight.


The horse pulled the hay fork to the proper height, then the boom was rotated into the proper position over the haystack by the "stacker", who then yelled to the wagon man to let go of the hay. The wagon man then jerked the rope controlling the latching mechanism on the fork and the hay fell on top of the stack. The wagon man then pulled the fork back to the wagon using the latching rope, and yelled at the derrick boy to let down the fork. The derrick boy then backed the derrick horse until the fork was down, and then waited for the wagon man to yell for him to take the fork back up.
The derrick horse I started with was a white mule named "Old Sal". I think every farm in the West had a white mule named "Old Sal". Later, "Old Dick" became the derrick horse; I don't remember what happened to "Old Sal". As I grew older, I graduated to more important positions, first to raker, then to mower, next as a pitcher, and finally as a wagon man.
The wild grass was harvested in the same way as the alfalfa, except that the pitchers were eliminated, because the hay was loaded onto the wagon by a mechanical device called a loader. The hay was first raked into windrows using a side-delivery rake, then the loader was attached to the rear of the hay wagon and pulled over the windrows. The loader was a rake-like cylinder with a slatted elevator, both driven by its own wheels; it gathered up the hay and deposited it in the wagon.

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There are two incidents that stand out from those days. First, one summer about 1930 we had a full crew working, which included a young man named Frosty Matthews, who was Pratt Matthews' son. About noon one day he complained that he didn't feel well, and he went to lie down in the shade for a while. It didn't help much because he got steadily worse; finally Dad took him home. It turned out that he had meningitis, and as a result was deaf for the rest of his life.

The other incident was more pleasant. Taft Wrathall wrote in his memoirs about the early days of Grantsville, and I have a copy, which is about 20 pages long. Taft's memoirs cover a lot of things, but the one thing he wrote about that applies here is how much he enjoyed the dinners he got when he was working for his half-brother "Paul Ed". Taft went into almost ecstatic detail in listing all the kinds of meat, fowl, fruit, vegetables, and especially pies and even home-made ice cream that was served at these dinners. His praise was profuse for the people who prepared the meals. Taft also mentioned that dinner was served at noon, for those who might have thought of it as an evening meal. This certainly underlines the hard work Mother performed at haying time.