QUESTION!!! What the heck is a Stone Boat!!!

JD Seller

Well-known Member
Read OXhill's post below. Seems that Bret4207 answered his question. Now for mine. What the heck is a "stone boat" used for??? How did you use it??? Is this something that was primarily used with horses???
 
It is a flat bottomed sled type thing with a raised front edge usually made of metal, sometimes the whole thing is metal and sometimes wood. Stones are tossed or rolled or walked onto it, depending on size, and then it is dragged away to the edge of the field or whatever. I have one here, though I have not used it for years.
Zach
 
jd you must live in great farmland area ,where there aint NO ROCKS, ???to not know what the old timers did with a stone boat ?,, around these parts the farmers wouldpik roks on inclimate days toss them in a sled,, then barge the sled to the county rd and take a pipe wrench and twist the boards in the floor allowing the rock to fall thru the floor onto the roadbed
 
shux jd ,after postin , I just read oxhills post too . now I am confused too, and wonder what function that iron plate is used for ?..don't know if that is a part used in the rotatin g floor panels or what,,. and to be honest I have never seen, or much leess ,worked a stone boat , like I describe in above post ,, but my family and farm neighbors that were born over 100 yrs ago have ...
 
Yep that's how I would describe it too. I remember grandpa telling me back in the old days when the snow got too deep he would haul manure with the stone boat too.
 
Stone boats are handy for all sorts of work. I use mine for moving round bales in the winter, hauling rock, short lengths of firewood, stumps, corn bundles from the shocks, etc.
 
Try to load photo again.
a127634.jpg
 
Yah, back in my younger days when I was a dirt poor horse farmer I used that kind also. Now that I have upgraded some of my equipment, I have a much better stone boat. LOL (Check photo in my post above)
 
Here are a couple of posts I wrote about stone boats.

http://oxhilldevons.com/2012/06/15/the-versatile-stone-boat/


http://oxhilldevons.com/2012/06/11/the-wheeled-or-mounted-stone-boat/
 
Wow! You surprised me- we"re about the same age, figured you"d have run across them, and although I wasn"t raised on a rocky farm, my uncles, on heavy soil, used them. Steel front, oak planks bolted on, dig the rocks out by hand and with levers....roll them onto the stone boat. Days before loader tractors, or farmers having backhoes. Major, gut-wrenching work back then. (BTW- stone boats don"t float very well!!!)
 
WOW, I guess this tells my age. I remember "helping dad and his hired man using the stone boat every spring picking up rocks. A man with a big iron bar could roll a large rock on to it. When loaded , the horse or a tractor would pull it to a wash out near the creek , then push the rocks off. Hard work , but that s how it was done. This was in northeast Ill. clint
 
Thanks guys. I guess it just is a fancy name for a sled.

We have always had a farm loader since I was real little. First one was an Energy loader on a IH M with a wide front end made out of a truck axle. Pump run off the fan pulley.

As far as rocks in the fields. We do not get many smaller rocks. Mostly bluff rock. When you find one it is too big to move. Usually put more dirt over it and farm across.

I found one out in a bottom I have just last year. Hit it with the chisel plow. Never had before. I took the backhoe out and was going to dig it out. When I got out to 10-12 feet across and still had not found the one edge I quit. Filled the hole back up and went an got some more dirt to built up over it.
 
First submarine was a stone Boat. LOL !

Actually, as others have said, it's a sled used for hauling stones out of a field or anywhere that you wanted to move them.

I'm a city kid, and I'm not a farmer now, but I certainly know about a Stone Boat. Used to help my Dad move rocks with one as a youngster.

Dad had an old Packard Touring Car & he'd hitch an old surplus military trailer to it and we'd drive to the L.A. river-bed. Dad would block the wheels & jack up the back end of the car. Then he removed a rear wheel & replaced it with two rims welded together that had cables wrapped around them. Then he got a 25 pound Danforth boat anchor that had a snatch-block on it, and the Stone Boat out of the trailer. He'd haul the Stone Boat, anchor, & cable out into the river-bed; set the anchor, put the cable thru the snatch-block and hook it to one end of the Stone Boat. The cable from the other rim went straight to the front of the Stone Boat. Dad had said this type of set-up was called a "Drag Line". We'd load large flat stones onto the Stone Boat & Dad would start the car, put it in gear and reel in the loaded Stone Boat, and we'd put the stones in the trailer. Then Dad would put the car in reverse & run the Stone Boat back out again.

Slickest set-up I've ever seen, never forgotten it.

We used the stones to build stone walls and a large stone patio on the back of the house.

Doc
 
We had a few different design stone boats over the years. The last one we made was hinged in the middle at the back. We would open the hinge, place the stone boat sides around the rock and then pull the stone boat with a chain rigged to "pinch" the rock and squeeze it up on top of the stone boat when the two halves came together. Worked pretty good on medium size rocks.

I used the point of the angled blade on the road grader to lift the rocks on top of the ground so they could be loaded onto the stone boat. On the larger rocks, we used the HD7 and dozer - except that there are some that even a D8 can't move.
 
The metal head is to keep the planks from wearing so bad and splitting in rock and to give you a solid place to hitch the clevis. I've never seen or heard of a stone boat with anything but a solid bottom before, but I've seen wagons rigged to dump by spreading the bottom boards mechanically.

A stone boat is about the handiest thing there is on a farm since God invented sunshine. My current rig is just treated 2x8's 10 foot long. I beveled both ends with a chainsaw and have chains attached to both end too. It's not fancy or real heavy duty but it works fine. A metal head in in the works someday. My previous model was 2x8 oak and lasted 15 years before the rot got it. Stone boats tend to live outside!
 
My great grandpa helped build a church in town by going to the quarry 5-6 miles one way, then hauling them back and another 2-3 miles in the other direction. this was after morning chores and all day till it was time for evening chores. Did it all with the stone boat.

Donovan from Wisconsin
 
Not sure about your area, but horse pulls are popular at the state fairs around here. Google "horse pulls" and look at some of the youtube videos, what they load the weights on is referred to as the "boat", it's basically a stone boat...
 
We used an old car hood behind the Farmall M for many, many years for anything we couldn't lift before we had a loader tractor. I bet the old hood is still in the woods behind the farm somewhere, probably with a load of rocks on it.
 
Our stone boat was used to pick stones off the field. In the North West corner of Ohio the ground has many stones from the size of your fist to the size of a car. When I was a kid dad hires a fellow to dynamite the big stones into smaller pieces which were rolled onto a stone boat to be removed to gullies, edge of a woods, along cattle lanes or put in piles around trees in the field. We would roll the larger stones plowed up onto a stone boat and after the field was fit and ready for a final sprint tooth drag we would pull the stone boat around the field and pick the smaller stones. When the larger hoes came to our area Dad had the piles buried and mechanical stone pickers were used to reduce the stone population in the fields. Areas in South Central Michigan fell into this stone problem as well where stone boats were used for picking stones. Much easier to load stones on a stone boat than to pick them up to trailer height. I built one last fall for my use with my miniature horse team to pick small stone off my worked ground.

DSC04011-vi.jpg
 
Be glad you don't know what one is JD.
I spent plenty of time as a kid hand loading manure onto a stone boat and then hand unloading it onto our big garden.
 
When I lived down in the mountains (Adirondacks) I had a little 6 acre place and one Percheron. There was a 56 Chrysler New Yorker (IIRC) in the woods behind the house. I took the hood off it and made a stone boat. I don't know how much manure I hauled with that thing, but it was a LOT! We had one heck of a garden back then I'll tell you. Should have brought it north into the flatlands with me.

Oxhill, like your site. We have a friend locally that does oxen, kind of famous for commercials and movies too, Anna Knapp-Peck. Good people.
 
(quoted from post at 23:17:01 09/04/13) Try to load photo again.
a127634.jpg

Stone Boat appear to be either identical or very similar to the unit at home . It's probably older than my Father. No idea what kind of lumber was used.
Must have been a big deal back in the day when steel was rare and expensive and even wrought iron was an "exotic" material.
 
Never saw one with a seat on it. We used to roll a down cow on the stone boat to get her out of the barn.
 
The stone boat we had in northern NY used the same head also. I was once told elm was the best wood for a stone boat, it's realy tough.
 
Elm is good as long as you store it under cover and off the ground. Elm is very stringy and won't split apart when abused, or when you try to split it for that matter! Locust is another good one and can take the weather.
 
Sounds like a nightmare one of dad's cousins had one year during rock-picking. Found a large rock, couldn't budge it with the rock picker, got the backhoe, and dug the length of the field before we found the edge.

We had a picker with a digger on front and a basket behind it, didn't work real well for anything but boulders, so we hand-filled it. Then we started using the backhoe and skid-loaders.

The only time I miss rocks is when it rains and I drove the Dodge to work (2wd, Cummins).
 

We sell tractor parts! We have the parts you need to repair your tractor - the right parts. Our low prices and years of research make us your best choice when you need parts. Shop Online Today.

Back
Top