Looking Back at Haystacks

By Willma Willis Gore
Updated on May 18, 2022
article image
by Pixabay/Vic_B

If I could, I’d put every child within easy reach of a haystack in his or her early years. Today, long past childhood and far from the ranch on which I was born, I look out on a modern barn. Its 20-foot pole legs support a metal roof that shelters tons of hay, all baled.

Yesterday a giant, motorized monster gobbled these bales from the field and stacked them, domino-neat, under the high barn roof. The process was quick and efficient. Neatly stacked bales, however, hold neither the challenges nor the dream-inducing fragrance of a mound of freshly cut alfalfa. And although country youngsters nowadays might enjoy any number of hayloft fort activities, those loose-piled haystack of yesteryear still hold a special place in my heart.

When I was a child, the hay that fed our small dairy herd in the winter was summer-grown by my father on our ranch. “Five crops again this year,” Dad would say, hiding a proud smile behind a weathered hand. He and our hired man, Orville, hand-forked load after pungent load onto the hay wagon before it was towed to the stack by our team, Nellie and Duke. Once the heaped wagon was parked next to the haystack, Dad took his place on a rig he’d remodeled from an old mowing machine. It was simply two wheels, a seat above an axle, and a tongue to which Nellie and Duke were harnessed. This “hay stacker” controlled one end of a cable that ran from the stacker through a pulley high on a pole and dangled a clamshell-like loading fork.

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