The Old Barn, Team, and Hayrack

Memories of the Old Barn and Hayrack as told by GWP:

Dad (Karl) built the barn. He started it around 1944. I helped with some of it. I was about eight years old when he started building it. It didn't get finished for a number of years––sometime around the early fifties. Gene and Bernard, as well as Karl Farr (hired) and others helped build it. The part on the left is the dairy barn or milk barn where we milked the cows––anywhere from a dozen to twenty.

The barn was torn down maybe 30-40 years ago. Gene built a new one in its place. It always had some hay in it. We loaded it with hay every fall to feed the livestock during the winter. Generally, by spring the hay was mostly used up.

I remember riding one of the work plugs (horses) on this front side to pull the hay fork full of hay up from the wagon load on the far side (north). This was boring work, but one had to stay alert while on the horse, listening for the shout to pull. Mom or the Twins would always come out and give us a drink of homemade root beer or lemonade. Once unloaded, we'd hitch the team back up to the wagon and head to the field for another load. I really didn't like hauling hay. Since I was the youngest, I had to tromp the hay on the wagon so we could load the wagon completely, making room for more hay. Joyce also helped in tromping the hay. The Twins also did this work before Joyce and I came along.

"Milk Barn and Hay Barn"
"Our Barn on the Dairy Farm"

(Click on picture to make it larger.)

"Our Team of Horses and Hayrack"

Madelyn, Blanche McAfee was Bernard's mother-in-law (Doris), Dad (Karl), Marilyn, Glen, Joyce, Mom (Cree) holding Lynn, my oldest nephew (Bernard and Doris' oldest).
Lynn was born about 1943, so this picture was probably taken in 1945 or so.

This is before the barn was built. We simply had a haystack with hay poles––a tripod of long poles to use for the hayfork. We used one of the work plugs to pull the hay from the wagon to the stack. The heavy rope we used for this ran through a pulley attached at the apex where the three poles come together and then anchored at the bottom of one of the hay poles--pretty crude, but workable. Notice the ladder leaning against the haystack. This was used for whoever had the job of stacking the hay by spreading it evenly each time it was dumped from the hay fork. Here we have just unloaded a load of hay, and everyone piled in for the picture.

The horses' names were Nig and Bally. Very docile and dependable, they were used for hauling hay, plowing ground, hay cutting, hauling pea silage, planting crops and spraying them. We used a team up until about 1946 when Dad bought his first Ferguson Tractor. Eventually, the team became obsolete and no longer used. We didn't bail hay until the early 1950's, if my memory serves me correctly. The hay seen here was cut, raked into windrows with a hay rake, put into shocks of hay, and then hauled by hand using pitch forks to throw it on the wagon. Typically, it took three to effectively haul hay--one to pitch it on either side of the wagon (Gene & Bernard or Dad) and one (me or Joyce) to tromp the stuff down to make room for more hay. Tromping was hard, sweaty, and dusty. The loose hay leaves always got down my neck, chest, back, and stuck to the sweat. Also, there was always the random snake that was inadvertently (most of the time) thrown up with a shock of hay, and this made life more interesting! Grasshoppers were also in great abundance in the hay. The team of horses pulled the wagon along between two rows of shocked hay in the field. They knew when to move ahead and stop on command––Giddy-up and Whoa.