ALTAMONT — The sky was blue one day in June. Small white clouds scudded overhead as sun warmed the backs of a bevy of men, their nostrils filled with the sweet scent of new-mown hay.

They had gathered to see if the flop rake they had built — 100 hours of labor — would work. The tool was invented in the late 1700s.

“It is the very first farm labor-saving tool, not too long after the Revolutionary War,” according to Everett Rau, one of the men who gathered at the field on the Altamont-Voorheesville Road used for overflow parking at the Altamont Fair.

In the 18th-Century, the wooden rake would have been hitched to a horse after the hay was hand-cut with a scythe or sickle. “All it took was one man, behind the rake, and a horse with a kid on it,” said Rau.

On this June day in 2016, the reconstructed rake was hitched to an early 1950s Farmall tractor, driven by Ben Beckmann.

Bill Donato stood behind the rake he had built. His task was to gather the machine-cut hay into windrows for baling.

“It worked,” he said. “It worked just the way it was supposed to.”

He also said, “It was an experiment that turned out fine.”

Donato grew up on a farm in Voorheesville. “It becomes part of you,” he said of farm life.

At 65, he has retired from a career as an operating engineer and enjoys his volunteer work as the superintendent for the Farm Machinery Museum at the Altamont Fair.

The flop rake will be on display this year along with many other early farming machines, each painstakingly restored by volunteers.

A windmill pumps water. Machines separate wheat from chaff. An antique splitter splits wood. A corn chopper shells corn and grinds it into chicken feed, consumed by chickens at the fair.

The noises of the antique engines compete with those of the nearby midway. “They all run in a rhythm,” said Donato.

They come from an era, he said, when machines were built to last, not to be thrown away when they needed fixing. “Some are 100 or 150 years old. They might be a little knocked up, but they’re still running,” he said.

A handful of volunteers keep the machines going and more volunteers are always welcome, Donato said.

“People are amazed,” he said, to see the old equipment in action. “When they actually see this stuff, they realize this is how you lived,” he said.

Hay fueled transportation

The newest addition to the collection, the flop rake, was inspired by a yard-long relic languishing at the fair.

“I came across it because it was in the Altamont Fair Museum, stored outside and starting to rot,” said Rau. This past spring, Rau came to a fair associates’ meeting, hefting the chunk of wood, and explaining its importance. “It excited me. I asked for volunteers,” he said.

“I’ve lived for a long time,” said Rau, who will turn 97 on Aug. 22. “For these people to listen to my words and volunteer their time and tools and intelligence gave me a lot of gratification.”

Rau said, “Bill Donato is the key man. He moved his heavy working tools to the fair building.”

In addition to Donato, he named these volunteers who helped with the flop-rake project: Bob Bernardi, Wayde Bush, Bill Rockenstyner, and Andy Tinning.

Rau sees hay in centuries past as similar to gasoline today — fueling transportation.

He points out that many homes in Altamont still have barns in their backyards which housed horses on the ground floor and had a loft, accessed by a door, on top for hay.

Labor of love

“Before, it would take 12 people with rakes to do what the flop rake can do in an hour,” said Donato. “A man and a horse could do three acres in an hour.”

He explained how the horse-drawn rake works. “When it’s full of hay, it stands straight up in the air. When the front gets full of hay, it flops over, and leaves a windrow. The points stick up both ways. The points in back go over to the front and start again.”

Donato also explained his role in walking behind the machine to guide it. “The handle keeps it from flopping over until you’re ready. You raise the handle to let it turn…You want to keep a straight row. So when the horse and wagon comes by, guys with pitchforks can throw it into the wagon.”

Donato started his project with the remnant Rau had presented, which looks to the uniformed eye, like just a board with regularly spaced holes in it.

How did Donato know how to proceed?

“The internet is a wonderful thing,” he answered with a chuckle.

Online, he found a picture of a flop rake in a museum. “We put the picture to scale,” he said, adding, “It was a challenge.”

The museum-quality reproduction was built on a limited budget. The lumber, mostly pine, was free, salvaged from a barn the fair had taken down, said Donato.

“They made two pins out of wood not metal,” said Rau. “They could have made a washer out of metal; it would have cost more.”

In a moment of reverie, thinking how it must have felt to be a farmer in 18th-Century America, Donato said, “Imagine the relief all the guys who had to rake would have felt when this came along.”

He jumped ahead in time to a half-century or more later and went on, “Around the Civil War, there were not enough people to make all the food they needed, so they started inventing more things. The horses needed hay to carry the armies into battle. Ev has pictures of them loading hay into train cars.”

Donato concluded, “Of course, the people on the farms were all set. The farmers are still feeding the world.”