Old fashioned hay making

At a local show a group of enthusiasts got together these horse drawn hay making equipment to re-create haymaking in the 1930's.

Dad had a horse drawn dump rake, a little larger than that and used two horses. His was foot operated to raise the teeth to dump the hay; didn't have a lever like that one. It was a very dangerous piece of equipment to operate.

Notice that the operator has nothing to hang onto. If the horse(s) run away, the operator usually fell forward and was dragged and tumbled by the rake teeth, often resulting in death.

Dad had a bucker with a horse on each end to bring the hay up to the hay stacker. He sat on the back as a counterweight to keep the long teeth from catching in the ground. If the team decided to run away with the bucker, all he had to do was let loose of the lines and step off of the back; that allowed the teeth to jam into the ground and stop the team real fast. If the horses were smart, they never tried a runaway when pulling the bucker.

My job when I was 6 years old was to drive the team that pulled the over-shot stacker part up with a bucker load of hay and dump it onto the hay stack, where my two older brothers leveled the stack with pitch forks.

That was the way that we put up hay until Dad bought a hand-threaded wire tie baler about 1948.

Often to understand something you have to know what came before!
As a youth I was puzzled why rakes were called "side delivery" rakes. (I didn't ask questions often, because there wasn't usually much of an answer.)
What other kind of rake could there be? Dad used to have a bunch of old dump rake teeth, and he would weld a piece on the shin piece of the plow where it wore rapidly.
I finally asked what a dump rake was. Looking back, I'm amazed at how long it took to get through my head the concept of raking across the field, and dumping so as to make a windrow perpendicular to the way you were driving!

My grandpa designed and patented the "overshot" stacker to put hay up on top of a stack, when he lived in Iowa. The stacker was all made out of wood, mostly 4X6 timbers.

John Deere found out about it and came to him and bought the patent rights to the stacker - then came back and took the stacker that he had made, claiming that it was part of the deal - and warned him not to make his own stacker as they owned the patent now.

When he moved to ND in 1918, he figured that he was far enough away from JD so it was safe to make his own stacker again. He also made a stacker for two of his sons (one was for my Dad). We used it until Dad bought the Case wire tire baler in 1948. Dad dismantled the stacker later and used the lumber elsewhere.

Do you have any pics that show the horse power stacker in action? I always wanted to see one working.