A man in overalls and a bowler hat with one hand on the long lever of a tall wooden baling press beside a barn door, hay spilling out.

Weston at Work Chapter 3 of 8

Twelve Tons: the Lockwood Press

How do two men squeeze twelve tons?

A Weston farmer spent years on one problem: how to squeeze hay into a tight bale with nothing but muscle. His sixth try got a patent.

A man in overalls and a bowler hat working the lever of a wooden box press beside a barn door, with hay spilling from it.
A box baling press at work beside a barn door, about 1905. The print is filed as Irving J. Lockwood; the Center is confirming who the man is. Weston History & Culture Center.

Georgetown Road, about 1905

Hay you could sell

The Lockwoods farmed on Georgetown Road for generations. Around 1900 a farmer could sell his hay and straw well, if it was baled: packed tight into blocks a wagon could carry to market.

Irving John Lockwood put it this way, in the flyer he printed to sell his press:

“The matter of having hay and straw in the condition the market demands it, (that is neatly baled,) is one of the largest sources of income of the farmers of Connecticut.”

He tried one way of doing it after another:

“Having applied five mechanical powers to a baling press, all of which I have discarded… I now have to offer to you, the fruit of several years' work—namely my sixth baling press.”

14 August 1906

US Patent 828,325: “Press”

Patent drawing sheet 1: the press in perspective, with a long lever on each side, and details of the lever tip and toothed bar. Patent drawing sheet 2: sections through the press box showing the follower and the levers. The first page of the patent's printed specification, headed United States Patent Office, Irving John Lockwood, of Weston, Connecticut. Press.

The two drawing sheets and the first page of the specification. Select one to open it full size.

The patent went to “Irving John Lockwood, of Weston, county of Fairfield, Connecticut”, filed on 7 October 1905 and granted on 14 August 1906, for a press “for condensing hay, straw, fodder, cotton”.

How it works

  1. Two long levers, one each side of the box, work like the handle of a jack.
  2. A toothed bar is pulled down a notch with every stroke, drawing the follower down onto the hay.
  3. The teeth are spaced unevenly, and the fulcrum moves, so the levers give more push the tighter the bale gets, just when the squeezing is hardest.

The patent adds that the same mechanism could work a press for “cider, wine, and like beverages”.

A printed flyer headed The Lockwood Baling Press, Something of Value to New England Farmers, signed I. J. Lockwood, Georgetown, Conn.
Irving Lockwood's flyer, signed from “R.F.D., Georgetown, Conn.” Weston History & Culture Center.

The sales pitch

“Something of value to New England farmers”

200 lb
bale
under 1 minute
to press it
2 men
“of average weight and strength”
12 tons
of pressure on the bale

“Two men, of average weight and strength, with this press can press a 200 lb. bale in less than one minute, exerting a pressure of twelve tons upon the same.”

“This press has been in use for several years; has baled over One Hundred and Fifty tons of hay and straw and has not been broken.”

A hundred and fifty tons is about 1,500 of his 200-pound bales. The press took up 30 by 48 inches of floor, stood six feet high, and made bales 24 by 30 by 48 inches.

Wood for the railroad

An engine in the woodlot

The Lockwoods sawed as well as farmed. On the Charles Lockwood farm a wheeled “Associated” gasoline engine, moved by work horses, drove a planer and a big table saw. It went out to the family's woodlots “in the Den” and cut chestnut and oak railroad ties for the New Haven Railroad, surveyors' stakes and planks for stoneboats.

It last ran on 4 July 1959, and was later given to the Center for its Cider Press Shed.

Remembered in 1999

A walk along Georgetown Road

Gertrude (Peterson) Johnson, born in 1911, shared her memories of Georgetown Road with the Historical Society's newsletter in 1999. At Irving Lockwood's farm, she recalled,

“there was a well in the middle of the kitchen so you didn't have to go outside to fetch water.”

A relative, Will “Plum” Lockwood, farmed at the Cannondale corner, where a huge windmill stood until, “like so many things in the early 1900s,” it “was lost to fire”.

From “A Walk Along Georgetown Road”, by Lynne Barrelle and Karin Giannitti, 1999.

A team of oxen with a farm wagon in an orchard: a man in front of the oxen, a man and a boy at the wagon and a boy on the ground.
Three generations of Lockwoods with their oxen, at the family homestead off Georgetown Road.

The Lockwood homestead

“We think”

The back of the print names them, carefully: Irving J. Lockwood on the ground; Willis Lockwood “(we think)”; Leroy Eugene Lockwood in the wagon “(we think)”; and their father, Charles Lockwood, in front of the oxen “(we think)”. It was taken south of the barn and north of the house.

The pencilled back of the print, naming the Lockwoods in the photograph. Leroy's widow and her loom, in Chapter 7 →
A tall weathered wooden hay baling machine on the barn floor beside a bale of hay and a banner titled The Lockwood Hay Baler.
The Lockwood hay baler in the Coley Barn, 2026.

Try lifting a bale

In the barn a Lockwood hay baler stands beside its banner, and children can haul a hay bale up on a rope and pulley. Lockwood's press squeezed one with twelve tons.

The Lockwood family's own story, and the loom that kept the farm going after 1931, will be told in a later chapter. The loom is in the barn now.

See it in the barn

Waiting for you in the Coley Barn

  • The Lockwood hay baler and its banner
  • The rope and pulley: haul a hay bale yourself
  • The working loom, from the Lockwood farm

Open Thursdays and the first and last Sundays of the month, 1–4 pm. $5 adults, $3 ages 5–17; under 5 and members free.

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