This historical marker commemorates the beaver slide, a wooden device used for stacking hay. It was originally called the Beaverhead Country Slide Stacker. It was invented in 1908 by two Big Hole Valley (located in Southwest Montana) residents: Dade Stephens and H. Armitage.
The device can stack hay up to 30 feet high, and the piles can last anywhere from 2 to 6 years. The body is a 30-foot wood frame with an inclined plane. Hay is pulled up to about 20 feet in the air before it’s launched through a gap at the top of the machine. The machine is portable so it could be moved from field to field.
While modern technology has largely replaced this device, it’s still in use in many places today.
Historical Marker Inscription
The Little Blackfoot Valley is filled with lush hay fields. You already may have noticed the rounded haystacks and commented on the strange lodgepole structures standing in many of the fields. This contraption that looks like a cross between a catapult and a cage is a hay-stacker that actually acts like a little of both. It was invented before 1910 by Dade Stephens and H. Armitage in the Big Hole Valley about sixty miles south of here. The device, called a beaver slide, revolutionized haying in Montana. It helped keep the wind from blowing the hay away and cut stacking time considerably.
To work the beaver slide, a large rake piled high with hay is run up the arms of the slide (the sloping portion of the “catapult”). At the top the hay dumps onto the stack. The side gates (the cage part) keep the stack in a neat pile and make it possible to stack higher. The sides were added to the system in the late 1940s. Although the lifting of the rake is usually powered by a take-off from a tractor, truck or car axle, on some operations horse teams still provide the rpm’s to muscle the hay up the slide.
Aside from minor improvements, the beaver slide has remained unchanged since its inception. Once used throughout a good portion of the northern west, modern technology that can shape hay into bales, loaves or huge jelly rolls have replaced it in many areas. The Little Blackfoot is one of several valleys in Montana where you can still see the beaver slide and its distinctive haystacks.
Location
46° 35’ 27.780” N, 112° 39’ 25.218” W
US-12, Avon, MT 59713, United States
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