Loading Hay Then and Now

I took this picture today of the kids unloading hay. We simply rolled it onto the tractor’s long forks and then it zips over to the hay barn and the tractor dumps it over.

This made me think of how they might have done all this on the Circle C. Hence the 1880 vs. 2023 pictures. Wagon, horses, and pulleys (and a lot of manpower) versus diesel-powered tractor and a little manpower). Even two young girls can do this!

They didn’t even have bales of hay in the 1800s. Just as lot of loose hay to haul up into the hayloft. But that made it fun to swing on a rope and drop onto the hay!

Published by Susan K. Marlow

I'm the author of the Circle C and Goldtown Adventures series. I blog as "Andi Carter," the main character in the Circle C series. She lives on a huge cattle ranch in 1880s California. These are her adventures.

19 thoughts on “Loading Hay Then and Now

  1. Cool post. I think it would have been fun playing in all the hay in the hayloft. Probably took a whole lot more work to store all of the hay then, than it does today.

  2. My sister and I did all of this, except we had tractors and a truck. I wanted a horse but we didn’t have one. I preferred loose hay because the bales were scratchy on my legs. You were right about what you wrote.

  3. I’ve always wanted to rope swing into a pile of hay, lol. It sounds like fun!
    I can’t imagine having to hall loose hay up to the hayloft. Hay bales would defiantly be easier.

  4. I love swinging on our rope swing into a bale of loose hay in our barn. I grew up Amish part of my life and we used a horse and wagon to bale hay.

      1. Sure! I was Old Order Amish. We left 4 years ago
        We are now born again Anabaptists.

      2. So cool!
        Do you mind if I ask if Beverly Lewis’s Amish books are accurate to the Amish life?
        Also do you miss your Amish life?

        -BookAdventurer

      3. That is really neat!
        Do you miss you Amish life?
        Are Beverly Lewis books accurate?
        -BookAdventurer

  5. For our hay day, we need like five people to get the bales up in the hay loft.
    We have like a hay elavator that shoots them up for us to stack.
    Its my least favorite barn day… luckely we get like 200-300 bales at once so we dont have to do it too often!

    1. That’s a lot!!! They usually get a “squeeze,” which is dozens of bales, but lately they would rather pick and choose to avoid any possible mold, which sometimes they find on the bottom bales.

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