Equipment
Harvest equipment

The haypress is an early version of the square hay baler that is so common today. It was a crucial tool for the John Boyd farms (Coldspring House and Cottonwood House) because it made the sale and transport of hay so much more precise and easier. You could weigh a square bale at the barn and know that it would weigh the same when it reached a mine site which is not true with hauling loose hay. We have evidence in the Boyd records of the haypress in operation as early as the 1880s.

The horsepower end would be dug into the ground so that it was easy for the team of horses to walk over the shaft and the bale plunger. Men would fork hay into the haypress by hand and the plunger would push them into 250 to 350 pound bales.

The horsepower gears are set up so that as the horses walked around the circle, carefully stepping over the shafts of course, the gears would first push the plunger into the bale chamber to compress the hay and then pull it out ready for the next batch of hay.

At the working end the hay would be accumulated in the chamber and then on the last plunge strings, 4 to 6 strand quite heavy duty rope really, would be hand tied around the bale before it was pushed out and put into storage.

As can be seen below the haypress was a New Model Steel Beauty built by the same people who later built the steam baler that is also on the site.