It once was a skill every man and boy over age 10 in rural Vermont and New Hampshire mastered, an activity absolutely vital to sustaining animal agriculture with antecedents tracing back thousands of years. Watching someone doing it today seems like it must be fairly easy, but swinging a scythe to cut grass fast and efficiently is anything but.

Until the animal-drawn mowing machine with its reciprocating knives was perfected in the middle of the 19th century, the scythe was the basic tool for harvesting hay all around the world. The legions of good scythemen would shrink steadily as mechanization of haymaking took over, to the point that by the 1950s barely anyone bothered to teach the young generations how to sharpen and handle the tool.

The looming disappearance of hand-mowing skills prompted the beginning of competitions in New Hampshire’s Sullivan County and Vermont’s Addison County 75 years ago where masters of the craft could show their proficiency and keep alive a fragment of agriculture the way it once was.

Stanley Colby was the University of New Hampshire Extension Service’s agricultural agent for Sullivan County when he dreamed up a contest to determine who was the best scytheman in his county. At about the same time, Lucien Paquette started a similar event in Addison County of Vermont. Nobody today can pin down which was first, but since both men knew each other and had the same type of position it can be surmised that one probably got the idea from the other and both events got going within a year or two of each other.

The contests in both locales tested speed mowing over a fixed course, width of cut, uniformity of the remaining crop stubble and neatness of the windrow of harvested plant material. Colby added a further dimension to scoring, though. Points were to be deducted for sassing the judges and for spitting tobacco juice on the course.

As time went on through the 1960s and 70s, the Sullivan County competition was split into an “old bucks” division for experienced hands and another class for greenhorns. The prizes would be vintage blades colorfully painted and lettered, suitable for wall hanging. The event in those years was held in conjunction with the annual Sullivan County Dairy Herd Improvement Association’s summer meeting and picnic. It would rotate from farm to farm each year.

Occasionally a competitor might discover an ice-cold bottle of beer sequestered in the tall grass and clover as he neared the finish line of his heat. The whole show was for fun, as contestants razzed each other and onlookers cheered for the fast guys and slowpokes alike.

But as the number of dairy farms in Sullivan County shriveled — more than 50 in 1960, fewer than a dozen today — the DHIA picnics ended, Colby retired and the county hand-mowing competition ceased in 1987.

Not so in Addison County, where it remains a fixture of the county’s large agricultural fair, the Addison County Field Days. Lucien Paquette was the founding spark plug of the Field Days three-quarters of a century ago and remained as the hand-mowing competition’s guiding light until his death at the age of 105 in 2021.

The North Haverhill Fair added a hand-mowing event 14 years ago and it draws competitors from the vicinity of Grafton and Orange counties plus entrants from afar, some of whom also compete at the Addison County test.

No longer are these competitions male-only events. Women and girls now are welcome, and some can swing a pretty mean scythe. There’s been a woman in recent years who competes in Addison’s expert class attired in a flowing dress. Another preps for competition by cutting the hay for her small herd of goats using nothing but a scythe.

Some people might think mowing with a scythe is a simple proposition, but if they take it up, they’ll soon learn otherwise. There are multiple elements to the swing; it is not at all like chopping down a tree or trimming a hedge. The blade needs to be kept parallel to the ground throughout the swing and the edge must be moving horizontally against the plant stem, like a knife slicing a loaf of bread. And a smooth cut will allow the severed stems to fall uniformly without becoming entangled in the next swing.

While the word scythe is the generic term for the tool, correctly the word only applies to the metal blade that cuts the crop. The handle to which the blade is attached is properly called the snath and the projecting grips attached to the snath are called the nibs. In American usage a snath is made of wood that is shaped into a pair of sweeping ergonomic curves. European snaths are often straight shafts fitted to broader, heavier scythe blades. And snaths now appear on the American market that are made of aluminum or even fiberglass.

For centuries manufacture of scythes was performed by blacksmiths for nearby customers. In the 19th century more specialized producers evolved — a few New Hampshire and Vermont towns still have neighborhoods called Scytheville. White ash was the most common wood for shaping into snaths, although a cherry snath will often fetch a higher value in the vintage tools trade today.

Plainfield was home to a small mill that made snaths of white ash until the late 1970s, when the operation succumbed to cheap foreign imports and later a major fire.

Sharpening a scythe is to hand mowing as pathology is to medicine: you have to have it down pat or you won’t progress. Setting a good edge has long been achieved by detaching the blade from the snath and grinding it on a stone wheel. Maintaining a keen edge out in the field involves the whet, a pocket-size stone. A shop on the Oliverian Brook in Pike, N.H., once produced whet stones.

Long before string trimmers and weed whackers, the scythe was a preferred means of cutting grass and weeds. Town and state highway crews wielded scythes to trim roadsides that couldn’t be reached by mowing machines. In some locations, livestock and horse owners battled with each other to cut grass by hand along rights-of-way to feed their critters.

The extent of labor expended to cut hay before mechanization is almost unimaginable today. Men and boys would form up elbow to elbow and proceed forward cutting the crop. Folklore has it that the fastest man with the scythe would be positioned at the right end of the echelon, so the ones up the line had to work quickly to keep ahead or else get jabbed in the heel by the blade sweeping to his right.

No such pressure ever infected those hand-mowing competitions founded by Colby and Paquette, however. They were started to showcase the old ways and to bring mirth and amusement to rural folks.

Legendary CBS News correspondent Charles Kuralt showed up at the Albert Read farm in West Claremont with a production crew in the summer of 1979 to film one of his “On the Road” reports. He was there to cover the Sullivan County DHIA’s hand-mowing contest. Kuralt schmoozed with old-timers sharpening their scythes and caught the essence of the quirky event. His broadcast segment ran over five minutes a few evenings later — rare for one to go that length — and was wrapped up with “And that’s the way it is, July 27, 1979, Walter Cronkite, CBS News.”

Steve Taylor, a Meriden resident, contributes occasionally to the Valley News. He speaks and writes frequently about agricultural history and rural life.