Metuchen Edison History Features

Recollections of

Boyhood Days

In Old Metuchen

By

David Trumbull Marshall

Published by The Case Publishing Co., Flushing NY 1930

(Second Edition)- (c) 1930

The Hay-Press.

In 1875, when my father had a school at the west end of Metuchen, the boys of the school included Charley Freeman, the son of Manning Freeman, the owner of the hay-press in that part of town.

A hay-press is a machine for baling hay.

When hay has to be transported in cars for any distance it is always made up into bales weighing from five to six hundred pounds.

A hay-press or hay-baler consisted in my day of a square chamber built of heavy planks extending from the cellar or basement of a hay barn up through the floor into the first story.

This chamber was about 3 by 3 by 15 feet deep.

At the top there was a heavy cover and for three feet at the side of the upper end there was a heavy door.

The bottom of this chamber could be let down to the level of the basement floor and was fitted with a heavy timber the length of the chamber.

The lower end of this timber was connected by means of a wire rope which passed over a windlass provided with a sweep which was turned by a team of horses.

With the floor of the press let down to the bottom, the press was filled with hay, the top slid in place, the side door closed and the horses went round and round and wound up the rope and drew in the bottom end of the heavy timber.

This lifted up the floor and toward the last, when the timber was nearly verticle, exerted an enormous pressure on the hay.

When the hay had been squeezed until the bottom of the press was within three feet of the top, three strands of tough steel bale-wire provided at each end with hooks were put around the bale and the side door released and the bottom of the press allowed to go down.

It used to seem to me that Sile Guernsey and · Abel Randolph and the other man who operated the press put in a prodigious amount of hay into the press, but it takes a lot of loose hay to make six hundred pounds.

These bales of hay were stored in the barn and every few days a box car was run up on the siding next the barn, and with Mr. Kellogg to keep tab of the weights of the bales, the car was loaded.

The barn containing the hay-press could hold a tremendous amount of hay.

We boys could never resist the temptation to climb up on the great beams and jump down into the hay. Some jumped when the haymow was nearly empty.

That was all right until one of the girls, a boarding scholar at our school, jumped down and broke her arm. That got my father in bad with her folks.

Manning Freeman, in addition to the hay barn and hay-press, kept a lumber yard. This yard was right next to our property.

In the afternoons, after school, we boys used to play kick-the-stick in this extensive lumber yard, part of which was under cover.

Manning Freeman was a very kindly old gentleman with a family of girls and one boy of his own. They all attended my father's school.

Mr. Freeman was too fond of children to object to our playing all over his hay barn and lumber yard.

He did scold me once for jumping on the freight cars which used to stop at the freight station next the hay press.

There was a long loading platform at the height of the platform which used always to be built at the ends of a freight car.

One day, all by myself, when I was about ten years old, I was jumping on the cars of a moving freight train, riding to the end of the platform, running back and repeating the ride as often as I dared until the freight train got up speed.

Manning Freeman, who was the freight agent at that time, caught me at that dangerous game.

I shall never forget him shaking his monitory finger at me and saying, "Don't you ever do that again."

I never did--just there.

Some years later when I attended college at New Brunswick and came home on a passenger train that stopped at the station then located at Lake Street, Metuchen, to save walking up to the Main Street crossing, then at grade, I used to jump off the steps of the moving train at the crossing.

Sometimes the train would get up a most alarming speed. How my feet did slam down on the planks of that crossing!

Some years afterward, when I worked at the car yards in Buffalo, N. Y., I got to be quite expert at jumping off and on the steps of a moving locomotive and quite an adept at running the engine also, for that matter.

When the Lehigh Valley Railroad first went through Metuchen there used to go trains of the little old-fashioned coal-cars literally a mile long.

We boys used to jump on the low ledge above the journal boxes and ride long distances. A most dangerous pastime but what do boys care for danger?

It is not until one grows older that one recognizes the fearful danger of the sports in which some boys engage.

I don't know of anything in the way of sport more dangerous than sliding down hill on a public road on a bob-sled, holding a dozen passengers and taking chances on running into some team on the one or two unguarded cross streets on the way down.

A boy in Hollis ran directly under an automobile and cut off the whole top of his skull.

Some of us, myself included, survived the perils of boyhood and some -- didn't.