On 01-25-98 Frank Masingill wrote to Day Brown... 
 
 FM>  DB> From time to time, I catch them at anomaly.  Like a 19th century 
 FM> farm 
 FM>  DB> scene with horse drawn wagons- hauling baled hay.  Haybales did 
 FM> not show 
 FM>  DB> up on the farm I was born on till the 1950's. before that, we 
 FM> usta put 
 FM>  DB> the hay up loose. I don't think I ever saw a baler that was made 
 FM> before 
 FM>  DB> 1940. 
 FM>  
 FM>    Day, I saw this and did a sort of double-take.  The wife and I are 
 FM> both 77 
 FM> years old so I carefully checked with her about hay-balers.  In our 
 FM> parts of 
 FM> the country (North and Central Louisiana) baling hay with wire was 
 FM> quite 
 FM> common in the 1930s and I believe in the 1920s as well.  I was 
 FM> surprised that 
 FM> I couldn't readily find sources in my own library (not heavily seeded 
 FM> with 
 FM> economic or scientific history) to indicate when various farm machines 
 FM> were 
 FM> first in existence but did note that McCormack was making some 
 FM> machines prior to the Civil War. 
 More anomalies; what can i say? Although, I might point out, the 
*need* for hay in Minnesota was several orders of magnitude higher 
than that of Louisianna, where pastures are green all year. 
 
Now, that I recall, the piece was a PBS drama about a midwife in 
the early years of the 19th, about the time McCormick was born. 
 
I did see a horse drawn baler once, and it did not see much use; 
it took at least three belgians to draw it.  They did not gain in 
use til a whole series of elements was in place.  Before them, I 
saw most farm profit in grains sold into the Chicago market. 
 
But as refer trucks came into use, lots of farms got into milk, 
and that meant more cows, more hay, and more hay storage in the
barn.  Replacing the horses with tractors meant that hay for the 
belgians could now be fed to dairy stock, and the tractors could 
run the balers better anyway, and the bales packed more hay in a 
loft than would naturally pack in a stack. 
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