A simple implement resembling a mono-runner sled used for the transportation of hay from the field in the days before baling became a locally common practice is described as observed in a restricted section of rural Ohio in 1945. This device appears to be previously unreported in the European and regional material culture literature; no antecedent implement is presently known. The simplicity and temporary nature of such items of material culture demonstrate the problems in inherent in interpreting disarticulated yet previously recycled historic artifacts.

Note:
The description of the subject farm implement for the first time in print affords the opportunity to simultaneously document this humble and little known item of material culture and contemplate its interface with regional historic archaeological investigations. As may be noted from the following discussion, the few items of likely recycled stable hardware needed to construct this implement serve to clearly demonstrate the problems - if not impossibility - of confidently interpreting certain categories of disarticulated historic artifacts.

A major portion of the senior author's childhood was spent in Brushcreek Township in rural Highland County, (south-central) Ohio. This location at the edge of the Appalachian escarpment was in many respects atavistic, retaining the southern-weighted flavor, customs, and methods of the 19th and perhaps 18th centuries. One possible holdover from earlier times was a method for transporting hay from the field in which it was cut to the haystack.

In general, the prevailing method for hay harvest (prior to the local rise in popularity of baling in the 1950s) was cutting with a horse drawn or tractor mounted sickle bar mower, raking into windrows, and loading into a wagon to which hay racks had been attached for transport to the stack site This process was labor and equipment intensive. A typical crew consisted of two wagons with drivers (each wagon pulled by either a team of horses or a tractor), at least three loaders, and one stack builder. This broke down into six people, two wagons, and four horses or two tractors. If the hay was being stored in a hay mow (barn loft), about the same size crew would have been required for reasonable efficiency.

During the season of 1945 while World War II was still in progress, there was a shortage of either manpower, equipment, or both in the hay crew with which the senior author (then 12 years of age) was associated. Consequently, a different method of transporting the hay to the stack site was adopted. After being cut and allowed to partially cure, the hay was raked and piled into "doodles". A hay doodle was in fact a small stack about four ft (1.2 m) in height and about the same in diameter. Thus, a hayfield would be filled with these small stacks or, colloquially, doodles which needed to be transported to the hay stack.

Transporting Hay
The actual transportation was assigned to the senior author and another boy somewhat older in age. This was accomplished by providing each of us with a horse to which a rather unusual contrivance was attached via a single tree. As recalled over half a century later, this device (Figure 1) consisted of a pole made from a freshly cut hickory sapling about three to four in. (7.6-10 cm) in diameter at the base and about eight ft (2.4 m) in length. A ring was attached by #9 wire to the basal end while the other end had been sharpened to a point with an ax. One end of a rope about twice the length of the sapling was tied to the single tree while the other was passed through the ring attached to the basal end of the pole. Another ring equal to or greater in size than the basal ring was then attached to the free ("bitter") end of the rope. Thus, when the pole was pulled behind the horse, the ring attached to the rope would prevent that rope from being pulled completely through the basal ring.

After these contrivances were attached, the horses were ridden into the hayfield and halted at a hay doodle. Here a hay hand would shove the sharpened end of the pole under the doodle, put the rope over the doodle, and place the ring tied to the bitter end over the sharpened end of the sapling. The doodle was then in a loop formed by the rope over its top and the sapling beneath it. When the horse walked forward, the loop tightened as the bitter end ring was pulled up the length of the pole and the rope was pulled through the basal ring. In this fashion, the doodle was secured and pulled to the stack site where it was released by removing the bitter end ring from the sharpened end of the sapling.

It is perhaps notable that most of the authors’ professional lives have been associated with fieldwork in rural settings in the eastern, southeastern, and midwestern portions of the United States. However, we recall only one instance of encountering a situation bearing similarity to that described herein. During the late 1960s while driving in the Pocanos of Pennsylvania, a small hillside hayfield (estimated less than 5 acres/2 hectares) containing "doodles" was casually noted by the senior author. Whether these doodles" were later moved by use of the mono-runner sled is not known. The steep topography of the field, however, would have been hazardous to the stability of a wheeled hay wagon but not to a farm sled or sledge as it was sometimes called.

Although to the best of the senior author's recollection at least 10 doodles would have been required to equal one wagon load of hay, this method reduced the previously enumerated personnel and equipment requirements to but one stacker, two hay hands, two boys, two horses, and no wagons or tractor. However, it increased the effort required at the hay stack as there was a loss of the elevated platform which would have been provided by a hay wagon. Regardless, it worked well allowing three farm neighbors and two boys to successfully "make hay" during a year when resources were minimal.

Discussion
The authors have no knowledge as to either the origin or name(s) of this device. Though it may have been invented due to the necessity of that particular time, this is highly doubtful. At the time this implement was observed and used, there was no experimentation or trial and error. These devices were built and they worked the first time. In consequence, it appears logical to believe that due to necessity a piece of the past was reclaimed and put to good use.

A brief review of the literary sources referable to material culture studies in both the Old and New World produced no additional information concerning historical antecedents of these humble implements. Although the relative simplicity of the device would suggest some possible antiquity, its origins remain unknown. Historical studies of English farming practices from the 11th-16th centuries note that hay production was a regular, though secondary, farm activity (Ault 1972:25-27; Homans 1970:41-42). Among the early non-wheeled forms of transport reported in the Scottish Highlands are a travois-like horse-drawn sledge fashioned from two parallel poles; a sled with two parallel runners; and the slipe (also slype), fabricated from a sturdy forked tree trunk (Grant 1961:281-283). Though the practice of “making hay” is briefly discussed, no mention is made of any specialized means of transporting it (ibid.:97-98). Generally similar drawn vehicles (typically designed for human rather than horse motive power) were also used in Ireland (Evans 1957:170-174). In that area, the two recorded means of carrying dried hay to the selected storage site were slipes and a wheeled platform called a rick-shifter (ibid.:155). Studies of traditional Welsh transportation devices have recorded only human-drawn slide-cars (a form of travois) and horse-drawn sleds (Fox 1931). Synoptic studies of traditional French agricultural tools and implements (Delamarre and Hairy 1971) and forms of rural transportation (Delamarre and Henninger 1972) make no mention of the use of a device such as observed in Ohio.

Of the forms of non-wheeled transportation recorded in Europe, sleds are abundantly documented in the folk cultural literature of the southeastern United States (cf. Glassie 1969:187-188; Riedl et al. 1976:149-150, plate 70) and "lizards" (vernacular name for slipe) have also been recorded in the region (Cavender 1975; Riedl et al. 1976:150-151, fig. 55). Implements such as the Ohio hay sled are not reported in either studies of southeastern traditional woodcraft (Clarke and Kohn 1976) or early American farm life (Sloane 1974). Though the material culture of hay stacking and storage is well documented in the western states (Jordan et al. 1997:105-121), the conveyances actually used to transport the hay are not discussed.

Conclusion
The combined attributes of size, load limitations, minimal cost, and ease of construction of these implements as observed in this part of rural Ohio suggest that such mono-runner sleds were probably used by small scale farmers for short distance hauling in situations too steep for the safe use of a wagon or, in the reported instance, when confronted with atypical periods of labor shortage which necessitated the revival and use of an archaic, less efficient but simultaneously less personnel intensive means of transporting their crop. Much as it may be anticipated that the near universal availability of tractors has effectively rendered this implement obsolete in terms of practical farm usage, it may reasonably be speculated that even in an era dominated by draft animals, its relative inefficiency likely always relegated it to being a secondary - rather than primary - means of harvesting hay. With the assistance and observations of colleagues in the region, the origin, history, distribution, and, indeed, the name(s) of this work-a-day item of material culture may be better understood. As an aside, it is somewhat interesting to speculate that the senior author may be the last living person to have used this device.

References Cited
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