ST. PAUL - Rural Alberta is littered with pieces of old farm machinery in various states of decay - remnants of days long gone when four-legged horsepower was used to drag plows and haying equipment across the land. Many people wouldn’t give a piece of old machinery like that a second thought but there are those among us who do.
Terry Stark is one of them. He’s a bit of history buff and knows the area where he lives in the County of St. Paul like the back of his hand.
Another person who had a keen interest in old farm equipment was the late Edgar Corbiere. His vision in 1999 to recreate an old-fashioned harvest from the 1930s has grown into the annual Haying in the 30’s event where vintage horse-drawn farm equipment is front and centre stage every August in Mallaig.
Stark has been a longtime supporter of Haying in the 30’s and its fund-raising efforts to assist people fighting cancer. For some time, he had been thinking about how he could make a meaningful contribution to the organization.
“Haying in the 30s’ in the past have supported my family members when they had cancer, and I wanted to do some very special in return – not just for my family but for everybody - for what their cause is.”
To say he stumbled across a unique idea would be fairly accurate.
Stark farms land near Bentley Lake. Over the years, the lake levels have receded. A handful of people would know that depending on the lake level at any given time an old metal implement seat might come into view just off the shoreline. With the lake level receding dramatically in recent years, Stark was able to pull what remained of a 1910 Dain sickle mower out of the mud last year.
The story goes that Oli Olson lost the mower to the lake likely sometime around the early 1950s, when the wet years came and there it stayed. “Everybody was cutting hay and all of a sudden it rained and filled up the slough bottoms . . . there was machinery all over the place in the County of St. Paul that was under water,” Stark said.
“It’s been a monumental thing. People always knew about it – the seat sticking out of the water. And when I walked up to it, it was instant – it had it all,” Stark said of how he quickly envisioned what he could do with the mower pieces.
The craftsman in him went to work. Using the mower’s original wheels and hubs and painstakingly incorporating the Dain decal and serial number, Stark created a one-of-a-kind bench from the last remnants of the more than a century-old implement.
“I had to get in contact with a Dain mower collector in South Dakota. I had to be accurate with it – to verify the date on it. They said definitely 1910.”
Detailing the bench with horse memorabilia, including horseshoes and hames, and with pitchforks to represent the all-important haying tool of yesteryear, he accomplished his goal of making something beautiful and meaningful; something that not only paid tribute to the history of agriculture in the region and the old mower from the lake, but also honoured the work of Haying in the 30's.
On Aug. 3, the bench sold for $7,000 at the Haying in the 30’s auction to Jacob and Carolyn Bueckert of Warner, with the proceeds going to support the society’s work to help people with cancer. Stark could not be happier.
“It was always in my mind that I wanted to make something very special for Haying in the 30's. I wanted something that when they put it in the auction, everybody would remember that bench and the story of that old mower."
