overshot hay stacker manufacturer

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.

An alternate system my father developed for use building stacks on a farm in Grand Forks County, North Dakota, employed a hydraulic hay stacker mounted on a tractor (in our case, a 1941 John Deere A).

On a fine summer day more than 165 years ago, a rancher in the Flint Hills of Kansas hitched a team to an overshot hay stacker and, with his hired men, went to work stacking hay.

I thought I should thank everyone for responding to my letter (Farm Collector, July 2002) concerning a hay stacker. I received one letter and two phone calls.

In 1900 the company was moved to Ottumwa, Iowa, where Dain produced harvesting equipment including sickle mowers, hay loaders, hay stackers and side-delivery rakes, as well as other pieces of farm equipment such as pump jacks, farm mixers, feed mills, corn cutters and hay presses.

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.