Posted 13 years ago
Culves
(1 item)
Meadows Manufacturing Company in Pontiac Illinois was a famous manufacturer of wagon dumps, elevators, washing machines and other farm equipment. About 1910, the company also began offering its Meadows Pitless Scale; like its contemporaries, this one was made of solid structural steel. Meadows continued building scales for a number of years. By 1930, it offered only repair parts.
This particular pitless scale was housed in a barn on the family farm in Bluff Springs, Illinois. The item was patented on May 7, 1912 and was in use prior to 1930. Until recently the scale was still connected to the original platform.
I have the same exact scale...love it....do you have any idea as to the value?
Oh, you don't know what it means to me that you put this shot up. I now have a picture of what this thing looked like. I'm nearly in tears. I brought a bunch of strange iron pieces home back in 1987 when I inherited some family land, the only identifiable piece being a scale with a plate that said it was a 1905 MacDonald pitless scale. I knew that it had been my gr.gr.grandfather's sugar cane weighing station and that he had co-opted out to all the neighboring farmers south of the Breaux Bridge area (Louisiana cajun country), but had no way to visualize him using it or how it worked, or what a sugar cane weighing station was supposed to look like.
I have the mechanics of the scale, it's pieces loose in the leaf litter of an overgrowth thicket of scrub woods. It's cabinet had fully rotted away and the little cypress hut my gr.gr. grandfather built around it was not far behind. The long winch arm was there under the brush, too, and some ways away, its massive gear wheels, 3 ft. in diameter. A little digging exposed the rail tracks, too, for the platform that people would drive their big sugar cane wagon trucks onto, up til 1938 anyway, when the big Breaux Bridge Sugar Co-op was built. Does anyone know what the price of these things was back then?
Thanks again, Culves, so much.
L