LANESVILLE, Ind. — Maynard Lamburtus, one of the directors on the board of the Lanesville Heritage Committee, spoke recently about an extremely old wooden hay rake that was donated to the town’s Heritage Festival a few years ago. The man who brought it in had found it in an old barn on the family’s farm.

"Maybe they were going to tear the barn down," Lamburtus said. "I don’t know what the story was with that; anyway, he had enough frame of mind to preserve it and bring it to us. We did some more preservation with it, but we didn’t know what we had, and so we put it in storage for a number of years."

Then about 18 months ago Lamburtus read one of columnist Cindy Ladage’s "Wrenching Tales" articles in Farm World and he realized what a gem they had. He did some investigation and called the Huber Machinery Museum in Marion, Ohio.

That hay rake turned out to be an example of the revolving hay rake made from ash and hickory that Edward Huber patented and began manufacturing in 1865.

Today the Huber Co. is still known, mostly for the vintage steam and gasoline tractors and road-building equipment that they produced in later years.

"We preserved the hay rake and under the right conditions, it is in workable condition," said Lamburtus, a mostly-retired farmer.

He explained, however, the old machine is fragile and if not taken care of it could easily be destroyed.

With the help of several committee members he repaired the machine and they mounted it on a flatbed wagon for people to look at and employ their imagination as to how it was used.

The article Lamburtus read back in February 2013 told about advertising copy for Huber’s hay rakes, which claimed one man using the revolving rake could do the same work of six men with hand rakes.

It explained most rakes in use at the time required farmers to stop their animals when the rakes were full of hay.

But, with the new revolving rake, a farmer could just lift the handle and cause another set of teeth to come into place to gather more hay, and dump the hay on the first set at the same time.

Lamburtus has been on the town’s Heritage Committee since it began in 1976. He said as far as he can remember the committee has never had to spend one dime for the historic equipment that has regularly been donated to it.

"It is either people stepping forward and giving us equipment on loan, or actually donating it to the organization," he said.

When he looks at the vintage implements and machinery that come in, he personally values them according to their historical significance rather than by how muchmoney they could bring. Right now, he believes the hay rake with all of the history behind it is the most interesting item the committee has received, in all that time.

To read Ladage’s original column, log online to www.farmworldonline.com/News/ArchiveArticle.asp?newsid=16187