overshot hay stacker factory

According to the dictionary, the jayhawk is a fictitious bird. But the Jayhawk at the Wykoff, Minn., home of Marv Grabau swoops through the air, bearing a 600-pound load of hay.

Marv’s Jayhawk is an overshot hay stacker, a piece of horse-drawn farm equipment patented in 1915. Manufactured by the F. Wyatt Mfg. Co. (which evolved into what is today the Hesston Corp.) in Salina, Kan., the long and leggy Jayhawk is a clutch-driven creature that stumps almost every onlooker. Measuring 12 feet wide, 30 feet long and 12 feet high with an 80-inch rear axle, the Jayhawk has a “head” (or “sweep”) originally used to lift hay into bins or cribs. “The head trips like a trip bucket on a tractor,” Marv says. “When it gets up so high, there’s a lever that dumps the load.” The sweep could hold approximately 600 pounds of loose hay as it swept overhead.

The Jayhawk dates to an era when cut hay was left in the fields, and later mounded for storage. “You had your hay windrowed with the old-fashioned dump rake,” Marv explains. “This sweep, or head, would push up, and when the sweep or head was full, you’d go over to a basket or crib – sometimes they had a crib, sometimes they didn’t – and stack it up inside. This particular stacker is 12 feet high, so you could get stacks of hay approximately 12 feet high. Then you’d pack it down and form a top on it like a bread loaf to help it shed water. You just kept moving around in the field, making these stacks until you were done.”

Last August, Marv loaded the stacker onto a trailer and hauled it to Spring Valley, Minn., for the annual Laura Ingalls Wilder Fest tractor show. An unwieldy critter, the Jayhawk fought the process. “It took me three hours just to load it onto the trailer and tie it down, plus the hauling time to town,” Marv says. But it was worth the trouble. “The Jayhawk was the center of attention,” he recalls. “They had about 95 tractors there and 34 implements, and this one drew the most curiosity.

Although the Jayhawk is a deceptively simple conglomeration of steel and cables, chains and wood, Marv invested nearly 40 hours in its restoration. He had to find new rear wheels because the original ones had been removed to allow a tractor to push the stacker. “When they converted it for use with a tractor, it was just a convenience,” he says. “I don’t know if they hooked it to a loader-type tractor or not. A mechanical lift on the front of a tractor is like a fifth wheel on a truck. That’s why they had to get rid of the rear wheels.”

Marv used two tractors with trip buckets to hold the raised sweep up as he worked to loosen the gears. “I had no one to show me how,” he says, “so it was all experimental.” Replacing the 8-foot wood tines on the head involved study and patience, as well as a search for the metal “teeth” that cover the ends of the tines. “The teeth keep the head from digging into the ground and breaking the tines,” he says. “They’re factory metal.” When Marv got the stacker, it had just four tines on it. He needed eight more, and found exactly that number in Waverly, Iowa. The formidable-looking tines now stand supported by a hay bin Marv built to accompany the stacker in the field.

The Jayhawk’s glory days ended in the middle part of the last century when mechanized implements and changing haying methods made the hay stacker obsolete. “After the 1915 horse-drawn model,” Marv says, “it was called a ‘Stackhand’ farm stacker. It was the same as this, only it was self-propelled, more or less. The reason they didn’t (sell well in the north) was that the weather here is so humid that hay rots more easily, so it was better to have it in a hay mow.”

Hay loaders and balers served farmers in a slightly different capacity than the Jayhawk. “The hay loader was the other thing that would’ve come after the hay stacker,” Marv says. “I’ve got a dump rake and the old side-delivery rake here, and the horse mower. I have a chain of command of haying pieces.” Several other restoration projects await, but for now, Marv is simply pleased to be able to display his haying equipment, including the flightless Jayhawk.

.Be it known that I, CLiN"roN A. Hananonn, a citizen of the United States, residing at Vestern Springs, in the county of Cook and State of Illinois, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Hay-Stackers, of which the following is a specification.

My invention relates to what are commonly called overshot hay stackers, in which a fork is mounted at one end of a swinging frame that is caused to swing in a vertical plane from a horizontal position to one substantially vertical in a manner to deposit its load upon the stack, the fork being provided with a guard at its rear end operative to retain the hay upon the fork tines, the guard being adjustable relative to the tines.

I attain this object by means of the mechanism illustrated by the accompanying drawing, in which Figure 1 is a side elevation of a hay stacker having my invention forming apart thereof; Fig. 2 is a top plan view of part of Fig. 1; Fig. 3 is a detached detail drawing illustrating the manner of adjusting the fork guard relative to the tines thereof; Fig.

1. A hay stacker including in combination, a swinging fork, said fork including a series of tines, a cross member secured to the rear ends of said tines, a series of guard fingers having their lower ends pivotally connected with said fork adjacent said cross member, a finger controlling bar, said bar having U-shaped members secured thereto, said fingers received by said U-shapedmembers in a manner permitting said bar to slide upward or downward along said fingers and to be interposed between said fingers and said cross member.

2. A hay stacker including, in combination, a swinging fork, said fork including a series of tines, a cross member secured to the rear ends of said tines, a series of guard fingers having their lower ends pivotally connected with said fork adjacent said cross member, brackets secured to said cross memher, said brackets having angularly disposed 7 portions at opposite ends thereof, a finger controlling bar, said bar having a slidable connection with said fingers, and means for securing said bar to either of the angularly disposed portions of said brackets.

3. A hay stacker including, in combination, a swinging fork, said fork including a series of tines, a cross member secured to the rear ends of said tines, a series of guard fingers havlng their lower ends pivotally connected with said fork adjacent said cross member, a finger controlling bar, said bar having U-shaped members secured thereto, said fingers received by said U-shaped members in a manner permitting said bar to slide upward or downward along said fingers and to be interposed between said fingers and said cross member, brackets secured to said cross member, said brackets having angularly disposed portions at opposite ends thereof adapted to receive said finger controlling bar, and releasable means for securing said bar to said brackets.

These photos from 1939 show a John Deere tractor using a Jayhawk hay stacker. These stackers were manufactured by The Wyatt Manufacturing Company of Salina, Kansas. Wyatt built and sold its first hay stacker around 1903 which was powered and drove by a team of four horses and was capable of lifting 700 pounds.

For decades hay stackers were needed equipment on any farm growing hay. Before mechanical balers, hay was cut then mounded in large piles for storage.

Ask any farmer/rancher over the age of fifty, what they believe is the biggest change in their operation during their lifetime, and they will likely say, “The method of putting up hay.” Harvesting corn is often mentioned; however, both comments will be followed by, “It used to be a lot of work.”

In the tri-state region, hay has been a prominent factor in most livestock operations from the time the area was homesteaded. At the end of the open range days, the region was known for not only its grazing characteristics, but the excellent grasses suitable for preservation. Because of weather conditions, it became apparent that the grasses needed to be preserved for livestock feed, especially during the winter. With the homesteader came the primitive methods of harvesting and preserving hay. The process started with cutting the hay by hand with sickles and scythes and bunching it, by hand, into small stacks. There were many attempts to improve on this method. Primitive cutting devices (mowers) were developed, as were rakes, sweeps and stackers, which all required work horses and mules to operate, and were extremely labor intensive.

One invention was made by Lige Hollenbeck. He patented several things, such as an elevator grader, a silo lifter, and a bee tomper. While spending a summer helping his brother Earl put up hay in the Nebraska Sandhills, Earl had fixed up a makeshift hay sled by taking cottonwood logs and putting planks on them, then with the use of a stacker rope, cabled hay on it when snow was on and fed cattle that way. Earl said, “By gosh, if I could just figure out a steering apparatus on it, I’d get the old chassis of a grain separator and underslung and make me a hay wagon.” Lige said, “That wouldn’t be very hard to do,” so on a rainy day he went to the shop and with the use of tin snips, tin, wire, and some little wheels off some toys made a steering apparatus, and with that model, began making hay wagons, setting up a plant at Long Pine, Nebraska. Many ranches in the tri-state ranching area benefited from Lige’s “Hollenbeck Hay Sled.” Elijah (Lige) died in 1945 at the age of 74, and at the time of his death was still making and selling those sleds, according to his book, Memories of a Sandhills Pioneer.

Although many early day ranchers made hay stacks by hand, they soon began using cages filled by a giant fork pulled by horses. The most popular types were the slide stacker and the overshot stacker, although these contraptions also required a number of hardy workers, especially those that “topped” the stacks by using a pitchfork to round off the tops of the giant stacks so as to better shed water. Various inventions were created in an attempt to improve on these stackers, like the “Jay Hawk,” which was invented by a Kansas Farmer. The Jay Hawk was of a simpler design, but quite awkward to operate, thus not as prevalent in our area. In the 1940s, when tractors began appearing in hay fields, the method of stacking hay remained the same, with the exception of tractors replacing horses. After World War II, military-surplus Jeeps also appeared in hay fields, pulling rakes.

According to Todd County Rancher, Glen Huddle, horses were the primary source of power in the family ranch hay field. “When I grew up, we were still using horses. I went to the service in 1951, and when I came back, dad had got a couple tractors and farmhands, but we still used the slide stacker and round cage.” Huddle said, “Those old timers would not believe how haying has changed today.”

Undoubtedly, the biggest change has been in the invention and use of the big round baler. In 1936, a man named Innes of Davenport, Iowa, invented an automatic square baler for hay, pointing the way to a round baler that became somewhat popular in the 1940s. Both balers did not work that well, according to “A Brief History of Twine”. In the late 1960s a Pella, Iowa farmer told Gary Vermeer that the process of making hay had him on the verge of leaving the cattle business. That tempted Gary to begin designing a “one-person hay system,” a baler that a single person could operate and one that opened a whole new level of productivity in the field. The introduction of the Vermeer round baler in 1971 has had a major influence on how cattle producers now harvest hay. Without a doubt, the invention of the big round baler has shaped the industry that feeds and fuels the world.

That"s a 656IH with the "stacker tower" on it- a man would sit up there and use a hydra-fork to move the hay around to build a strong level stack, with a domed top to shed water. Stacks weighed around 6 tons.

A 340 IH is reveresed for a hay sweep to push the hay onto the stacker head. We also had some sweeps that were built on pickup chassis- those would really fly but tended to overheat pretty easily and could get stuck on the wet meadows.

The stacker in the picture fell victim to my dad smashing it with a loader a few years back, but I still have a complete one stored on a place we bought from an uncle.