A Roll in the Hay...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau
Last week, the first load of winter hay arrived at the Poore Farm, my West Newbury home that is also a sanctuary for 19 farm animals with a variety of entertaining backstories. A hulking young man backed his truck up to our storage shed, and my husband James and I scrambled to keep up as he tossed fifty-pound bales of fragrant first-cut grass hay for us to stack (but isn’t all hay just grass, you ask? Oh, you just wait…). We have just enough to feed our sanctuary animals for two months.
We are lucky to have sufficient summer grazing for our massive Belgian draft horse, Chief, but nine months of the year, he eats two ten-dollar bales of hay every day. It is our single largest expense.
Chief, the 18.3 hands high Belgian draft horse, eating the author out of house and home. (Courtesy image.)
Walk into any feed store, and one is presented with a vast array of hay products. It is steamed, pelleted, cubed, chopped, made of timothy, alfalfa, Bermuda, orchard grass. Older horses can have their hay delivered in a soupy mash, mixed with beet pulp and molasses. There is special hay for rabbits and chinchillas. As with so many foodstuffs in our industrialized world, hay is international, highly processed, packaged and specialized. The winter hay I just bought came from upstate New York. Last year’s spring haul was from Alberta, Ontario. Land is so valuable, and therefore grassland so scarce in Essex County, that we do not grow enough hay to feed our resident animals.
The author and friends harvesting hay at the Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm, Newbury, Mass. (Courtesy image.)
But hay is everything, or it was. It is the reason we are here. We may think of Puritan New England as an entirely religious enterprise, and that is not untrue, but human motives are always complicated. For many of the early European settlers of Newbury, the lure of profit was equally, if not more, alluring than spiritual purity. Newbury was founded as a stock-raising enterprise, and the stock that could be the most profitable, cattle and sheep, required vast amounts of hay. Hay, the mixed meadow grasses that can be dried and fed during the many months of the year when grazing is sparse, relies on cleared fields. There were some cleared areas along the coast, the result of Native American agricultural practices, but most of Newbury was wooded.
Find an ax. Go outside. Take down one big tree, stump and roots and all, using nothing but that ax, unless your neighbor has an ox, and then maybe you can borrow him. Now imagine doing this to hundreds of trees and bushes, chopping and burning and pulling. Wait a year. Pull up anything you missed. Wait another winter. Maybe, if you are lucky, your cows and sheep get their first mouthful of grass, or you get your first hay, the following year. But not here in Newbury. For lo, God hath given us the salt marsh. Not a tree in sight. Magical, nourishing marsh hay, year one. We survived the first winter, the starving time, and there was much rejoicing.
Hay was so important to the survival of the community that its theft, even by accident, as in the case of an escaped cow or horse that munched a neighbor’s stash, shows up in the court record. Marsh and meadow hay land was listed separately in estate inventories, along with quantities of stored hay. In the inventory of Newbury’s Thomas Millward, who died on September 2, 1653, taken by Percival Lowell, Richard Lowle and Anthony Somerby, “twelve akers of salt marsh,” “five akers of salt marsh,” and “three akers of meadow” fed his “five cowes, three oxen, three calves, halfe of two yearlings, halfe a mare, halfe a horse and halfe of seaven ewes and a ram.” He had no hay stored up – perhaps his final illness meant that he had not yet been able to mow his fields.
Haying on the Poore Farm, circa 1930. Pictured is the author's great-uncle Raymond and great-grandfather Philip Poore. (Courtesy image.)
Over time, the unique conditions needed to harvest and store marsh hay shaped the landscape and traditions of this community. Hay was piled up on staddles, stout posts driven into the marsh and shaped to withstand wind, rain and snow. Special shoes were made for the horse and ox teams who traversed the marsh, iron and wood contraptions that strapped to the animals’ feet and helped prevent them from sinking into the bog. Pungs, hay wagons with wide sled runners, slid across the grass in the summer and the ice in the winter. Channels were cut for transportation and drainage. Camps sprang up on high ground in the marsh, and all the best and worst impulses of a community played out there; theft, romance, cooperation, bullying, drinking, even murder, but that is a story for another time.
This early 20th century bog or marsh horseshoe was attached to the hoof with leather straps. (Courtesy image.)
As cities grew, the gas stations of their time were the Haymarkets, where fuel for the literal horsepower of the residents was brought in from the surrounding countryside. An aside – I was forty-four-years-old before I realized that haymarkets were literally markets for hay, which is why they are in every major old city in the world. Hay is embedded in language, culture, ritual, art. We “roll in the hay.” We “make hay while the sun shines.” We “hit the hay,” “cut a swath,” find needles in haystacks.
Years ago, when my friendship with James was turning to something else, I wooed my love with hay words. I had been asked to give a talk on salt marsh hay and did a deep dive into the language of hay, archaic words and modern turns of phrase, all linked to the humble dry grass that changed the world. When he mentioned that the Ipswich Brewery (now removed to Brewery Place) was located on Hayward Street, I sent him the information I had gathered on the role of the hay warden in early Ipswich. He was intrigued. Every day thereafter, I sent him a new word, a thinly veiled love note.
There was medkniche, the reward given to the warden who weighed your hay, just as much hay as he could lift as high as his knee with his middle finger. There were placks and rickles, names for different shapes of haystacks. He replied by suggesting that Plack and Rickle would be perfect names for our first team of oxen, and that is when I knew he was meant for me.
There is heartbreak, too, in the language of hay. We briefly separated in that first year, and I went into deep mourning for the loss of my true love (insert mournful madrigal here). The morning after our tearful farewells, I sent him the last hay word.
Aftermath: the period immediately following a usually ruinous event, from the 14th century meaning “after the mowing.”
