DB> From time to time, I catch them at anomaly.  Like a 19th century farm
 DB> scene with horse drawn wagons- hauling baled hay.  Haybales did not show
 DB> up on the farm I was born on till the 1950's. before that, we usta put
 DB> the hay up loose. I don't think I ever saw a baler that was made before
 DB> 1940.
   Day, I saw this and did a sort of double-take.  The wife and I are both 77
years old so I carefully checked with her about hay-balers.  In our parts of
the country (North and Central Louisiana) baling hay with wire was quite
common in the 1930s and I believe in the 1920s as well.  I was surprised that
I couldn't readily find sources in my own library (not heavily seeded with
economic or scientific history) to indicate when various farm machines were
first in existence but did note that McCormack was making some machines prior
to the Civil War.  
   I have, of course, in recent years seen, in Virginia for one, that hay is
often stacked.  Quite frankly I don't know whether it is eventually baled 
nto
the rectangular bales with which we are so familiar or not.  The compressed
bales made it easier to store more of it in barns.  The smell was wonderful.
I'm a little more familiar with the handling of cotton products as I actually
worked in a cotton gin of the 1930s and sold cottonseed meal and hulls during
the off season when the cotton mill in an adjacent town was processing the
seeds to take off the short fibres for making rough cloth and crushing the
seeds for animal food and oil.  Woe to us if we made a mistake and left the
feedhouse door open so that the old cow could kill herself eating cottonseed
meal.  The cottonseed meal cake was used by commercial fishermen to catch
buffalo fish, Gaspar Goo, Catfish and other large ones.  
   I HAVE plowed with walking cultivators and occasionally with tractors in
the 1930s.  I don't believe I ever learned, as my grandfather knew how to do,
to plow a straight furrow.  We gathered peanuts, potatoes, etc, as he "broke"
the middles and threw them in the barn.  Peanuts were thrown in vines and 
ll.
We didn't munch on them until they dried.  
   And I could not really consider myself a farm boy as were many with whom I
played and had as schoolmates.  
 My father (deceased in 1968) was born in 1896 and had an 8th grade education
but learned a good deal about things as HIS father was, for a while in the
small-town newspaper business.  I remember Dad telling me that it was a 
ommon
story that William Jennings Bryan could sleep three minutes if he had a five
minute rest period on the campaign trail.  Bryan was a dominant politician of
his day but most of the serous students I had considered him a phony in
summary.  One contemporary said that as Secretary of State for a while under
Woodrow Wilson he "ran the Department like the back door of a kitchen."  His
campaign slogan in 1986 was "you shall not push this crown of thorns down 
pon
the brow of labor; you shall not crucify the farmers on a cross of gold!"
But, (grin), he didn't win, did he???   Plow under your cities, he asserted,
and leave the farms there and the cities will quickly spring back into
existence but destroy the farmers and the cities will wither and die on the
vine!!!   That was LONG before colossal, international agribusiness with 
iant
governmental subsidies. 
Sincerely, 
                                     Frank
                                                                              
                                                       
--- PPoint 2.05
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