I LOVE it..but then again, I love anything old and dirty.

Kewell!!!.....Nifty old fork!! Grant Wood was there!!!

Here is a link that might be useful: Fork!

Wow - great find - the tines even look to be in good shape!

The only thing I ever found in my back yard (besides broken glass) was the original herringbone patterned brick patio that was under 5" of dirt. It's pretty amazing how fast vegetation can compost over something if left undisturbed. Did you find it in an area that could possibly be an old privy or dump site?
Hester

Sass, I'll resist the obvious question about your spouse. :-)

Linda, it does look like that. Maybe I should find a place in the house to hang it as an art object. For a while I had an antique sickle on the wall, but I decided it looked too threatening.

Hester, we found the old dump site in the back, a little ways into the woods. This was unearthed right in the front yard, so it puzzles me how it ended up under that soil.

BTW, we haven't dug into the dump site, but the top layer is certainly uninspiring........mostly rotted tin cans.

That fork may not be nearly as old as you think it is.

Technically speaking, that is a "Hay fork". Hay forks are lightweight and have two or three long slender tines with a rounded backing and they are primarily used for handling loose hay, straw or corn fodder as opposed to a "manure fork" which would have 4 or 5 tines and a square backing that you can put your foot against for heavier digging in the same manner as using a shovel when cleaning barns and stables.

While I have found some references to that type of fork as early as 1833, they can still be purchased new at any agricultural supply store today.

I was born in 1947 and grew up on a 200 acre family dairy farm in N.E. Ohio where we still farmed the old ways with horses and horse drawn equipment. As a boy on the farm learning to drive a team of draft horses and mastering the use of forks was a right of passage. We would begin making hay & cutting and threshing grain in mid June and the little boys had to go berry picking with the women and the girls, but once you had demonstrated that you could drive a team of horses and had mastered the use of a fork you could go to the fields with the men. I personally began driving a team of horses and pulling wagons to and from the fields the summer before I began school in the first grade. Although I was still a bit too small to handle a fork for loading wagons, by that time I was quite adept at using a fork to carry straw from the two 40' high straw stacks behind the barn into the cow stable, then using the fork to shake out straw to bed the cows for the night.

In regards to how your fork may have ended up underground, I can think of two possibilities.

1. You say that this was found on the edge of your garden plot. On our farm we would occasionally use a Scythe to cut the grass and weeds on the edges of the garden plot, then use a fork to carry the cuttings to the hog lot, or sometimes pile it up to be burned when dry. It is possible that it was used in that manner and for reasons unknown it was inadvertently left out.

2. It is quite possible that a young boy, such as myself, had taken the fork out there on the pretext of imitating the men, and as is common to boys everywhere, once the fun wore off, if was just left lying wherever.

Interesting, Lazypup! If you look at the tines, the one on the left seems to be heavily encrusted with dirt, but it's actually deformed from rust. I wonder why the others, particularly the one on the right, aren't as damaged?

Re your possibility #1, I created all the flower beds in the front yard. When we moved here it was just lawn. This year I extended one of the beds to run along the edge of the road for about 15 feet, and that's where I found the fork. I know previous owners several generations back grew flowers on the other side of the road, directly across from my front yard, so maybe there's a connection.

By the way, when I first started growing flowers here I dug up a number of plants from across the road and gave them some TLC in my garden: Phlox, Sweet William, a Daylily. My biggest success was a single leaf that I recognized as a peony. It exploded into a huge peony: Festiva Maxima, gorgeous and fragrant. It made the elderly man down the road cry, because his mother had planted it when he was a child.

When we moved into this house 35 years ago, I was told there had been a brick walk across the front yard...no trace of it at that time. When I have ahd the lawn aerated, the man running the aerator sure knew there was something under the grass. And in recent years those bricks are emerging! I have pulled out 5 or 6 and filled the holes and planted grass seed....and this spring there are 2 more showing their edges.
I wonder if years from now someone will find my Felco clippers and wonder how they came to be out there?
Linda C

I also grew up on a farm, and it's surprising how often tools go missing and are never found again. It's quite possible that it was just dropped and and lost for all these years, like Lazypup suggests. Our home is built on an old school lot that was previously cow pasture and then later used again for farm purposes (the farmer that owned the land stored his oats in the school.) We've found some very interesting stuff as we've cleared the lot. The most imposing are the huge blocks of concrete that the swing set was anchored in. We also found some gizmos that were placed around the neck of the cows to prevent them from sticking their heads through the fence when grazing. We also have some old dump pile back in the woods and our kids loved to wander back there and bring home treasures.

Annie

LMAO @ Alisande. I do decorative finishes on walls and my favorites are the 6 and 7 layer finishes that look like the walls have been there for years..and are old and dirty. When I say that, my husband who's 58, likes it more and more...the older he gets.