Earlier in the summer, I was strolling around Wahoo, Nebraska, killing time waiting for my grandson’s baseball game to start. At the eastern end of Main Street is a large building for sale: “D. R. Phelps Lumber & Coal Co. 1900 – 1944”.
Being an interested buyer (nosy), I decided to give it a closer look. The aging building had a fresh coat of paint on it and the structure looked really solid; i.e. no sagging beams, sinking foundation, etc. I couldn’t imagine it had been closed since 1944. I walked around the back to see what it looked like (you don’t want to buy a pig in a poke).
I found this old farm wagon with steel wheels and a tractor-like seat at the front, which told me it was pulled by horses. At the rear of the wagon was a rack of “spikes” that rotated around an axle as the the wagon moved forward. The spikes were about 8-10″ long and too narrow to plow, looking more like a rake of some sort. What is this thing?
Thought for the Day: It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. Albert Einstein
That, my nephew, is a manure spreader!! After you clean the barns you load it in the wagon, go to the fields and fertilize the soil. Well, that is the way things were done before you could buy fertilizer in a bag. Harriet (and Gerald agrees with me that was the good old days).
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Harriet, what a great answer. I did a Google image search and found a lot of wagons, but not one to match that one. http://tinyurl.com/j3cba2z
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