Steve Weeber was touring the Kalona Historical Village a few years ago when he spotted a couple of hay trolleys in the museum’s collection.

The folks at the museum did not know much about them.

Now they do.

Weeber is an amateur historian who is an expert on hay trolleys made by Bill Louden and his son in Fairfield from the post-Civil War era to the 1950s.

Hay trolleys were devices for lifting hay from the ground into the hay lofts of barns. Nearly every farm in this area had one.

Weeber talked with about 50 people who attended his presentation at the Historical Village on Oct. 22. Some attending told stories about their use of hay trolleys in years gone by.

Back in the days of the Civil War, mowing hay, stacking it and then tossing it up into a barn for storage was all done by hand, Weeber said.

“Everything was done with manpower,” he said.

Then came horse-drawn mowers and rakes that began to mechanize the process. Still, moving the hay into the hay lofts was a manual process.

That is until Bill Louden tackled the problem.

“He was a big part of the mechanization of the farm in America,” Weeber said. “A lot of these people mention him right along with McCormick and John Deere.”

Louden developed the hay trolley, a wooden device that worked like a block and tackle to lift the hay from wagons to the hay loft and then trundle it back into the barn on a track where it was dropped into place for storage.

“It pitched the hay up into the hay mow instead of by hand,” Weeber said.

The Louden trolley allowed farmers to build higher barns, store more hay and keep more livestock over the winter.

Louden filed patents on the Louden No. 1 trolley between 1868 and 1889. He kept improving the trolley every year, making them work smoother and lifting heavier weights.

Over the years, the trolleys progressed from wood to cast iron. He manufactured these in Fairfield and sold them through a catalog.

“Every hardware store in America got one of these Louden catalogs,” Weeber said.

In those days, the trolleys sold for a dollar or two. Today they can sell for hundreds of dollars and are hot commodities in China and Europe, according to Weeber.

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