I don't need a hayfork

but I need to make some for my Craft Genealogy book

[I recently bought a small-ish white oak log. Not very common around here. It had some obvious bumps and flaws in it, but I could see there was a good bit of straight, clear stock too. it was about 12’ long I think, 18” or so in diameter. It’s perfect for chair work and I’ll make a lot of chair parts from it - but I bought it to make something no one needs. A wooden pitchfork. This blog post is based on some writing for my Craft Genealogy book. While the whole point of that book is stories about people, there are some woodworking projects scattered throughout it. And the hayfork is an important part of that story. Be aware, the full blog post is long - even after I cut a lot out.]

I first heard of wooden hayforks from Drew Langsner’s book Country Woodcraft, which I bought when it was new in 1978. I read that book until it fell apart, got another copy and read it too. In the preface to his 1987 book Green Woodworking Drew noted:

My first income-producing project was the making of wooden hayforks based on an old Mennonite pattern from Pennsylvania. I learned how to make them from a friend of a friend who was travelling through our area. After a few crude starters, I was making hayforks that were good enough to sell.

5-tine fork by Drew Langsner

Roy Underhill made them too, one is in his first book The Woodwright’s Shop in 1981. Not long after that, I saw them in a slightly earlier book - A Yankee Way with Wood by Phyllis Meras (1975). She included a chapter called “Wooden Pitchforks are a Pleasure to Use” featuring the work of George Havell of southwestern Vermont. As part of the introduction to that chapter, Meras wrote:

There are not more than a dozen people in America today making wooden pitchforks...the founder of the movement is a soft-spoken former mechanical engineer named David Sawyer...who recounts...it was a Mennonite in Pennsylvania who taught him...

I made a couple somewhere around 1990, I was making Windsor chairs then and familiar with shaving and bending long stuff. Then I forgot about them until the craft genealogy project came up. As I collected stories for this book, hayforks came up again and again. Dave Sawyer, in a 2016 interview with Mortise & Tenon magazine, talked about making them as demonstrations:

the nice thing about a pitchfork is that if you’re demonstrating at a craft fair you can get one made in about forty-five minutes. Somebody can actually have enough attention in that environment to see the whole thing, which you certainly can’t do with a Windsor chair.

Both Dave’s story and Drew’s point to a Mennonite/Pennsylvania source for these forks. My research indicates Dave either learned them from, or alongside, Daniel O’Hagan (who was not Mennonite) in 1965. Drew doesn’t remember who showed him how to make them other than “a friend of a friend…” but it was before he met either Sawyer or O’Hagan. Dave Sawyer’s first wife Nancy recalled that when she and Dave spent part of 1965 at O’Hagan’s they were mostly learning about using the froe, drawknife and schnitzelbank (shaving horse).

Daniel’s shop notes include 60 index cards on forks, spanning 1965-1989, mostly from 1965-67. The first entry is about repairing some forks in March 1965.

Wooden Forks Shaking Forks*

I guess the pitch-fork has been metal for a long time but the shaking fork hasn’t.* There are many examples of this ingeniousness with wood still around. In fact just recently I had 8 of them in my shop for repair...from 3 tines to 7...& the beautiful 3 tine one about 75 years old.

Some things to note about them are:

• They are nearly all hickory...once in a while one of white oak

• the tines are bent parallel to the annual rings, not at right angles...so annual rings horizontal

• a rivet is place[d] just above the saw kerfs to ensure against splitting in the making & after

• if the fork is more than three tines the two outer only are made heavier for strength.

• the dowels are driven through a dowel plate green & hammered home then each tine is tacked on the back to stay.

• all excess wood is taken off & as in farm wagons they are decorated thereby.

*used for shaking straw in bedding or, and, threshing.

Later that year, he went from repairing forks to making them from scratch - learning to do so from Milton Young, a Mennonite woodworker in Lancaster County. In 1965 Mr. Young was 78 years old, Daniel was about 42. He started working alongside Milton in March, making wooden canes. But going by Daniel’s notes, they didn’t work together on forks until December of that year. At this point, all I can say for sure is that Milton taught Daniel and either Dave learned alongside him there, or from him.

From Daniel’s notes we can see the exact date he began making forks:

December 21, 1965

This morning Milton Young showed me how he’s been making forks for over 50 years, his father before him and some of his brothers made them.

Some months ago I repaired a beautiful 3 tine fork his father had made about 50 years or more ago. How gracefully it was bent, how beautifully proportioned...not an ounce of excess wood...strong just in the right places.

He described the materials and methods they went through to make the fork. As to the wood - Mr. Young was particular about hickory, his favorite apparently was a cross between pignut and shellbark “a rare tree but first choice...” Those same two trees could be used also, then white oak gets a mention. The hickory I’ve been using the past few years for chair seating bark has grown too slowly to be suitable for bending into these forks. So white oak for me. Ash would work too.

splitting a section of white oak