John Boughen and John Ferguson.

A John Boughen story:
One of my earliest memories is of going with my Dad out to Cecil Mercer's mill at Elizabethville to have rubber tires put on the old horse-drawn steel-rimmed wooden wagon wheels. This would have been in 1946 or 1947. Perhaps this was the start of modern technology on our farm.
This was done so that it would lower the wagon rack about 1.5 feet closer to the ground so it was much easier to throw the hay from the haycocks (round mounds of hay) up onto the wagon. And also you could go a little faster from the hayfield down the farm lane to the barn because the wagon was on rubber tires.
This was also done in the late 1930's I have been told by a farmer from Elizabethville.
Cecil 'Lefty' Mercer was so good at cutting down the wooden spokes he could do it without measuring the length of the spokes (the wooden spokes that came out of the wheel hub were now about 9 inches long). Once this was done a steel rim was put on over the wooden spokes and then a 14 inch rubber wagon tire was put on over the steel rim.
I can remember driving the horses when we used to load the hay on the lowered wagon racks from the haycocks, but then it was only a few years before Dad bought a hay loader that was hooked on to the back of the wagon and then we drove the wagon straddling the swath of hay, and the loader picked up the hay and brought it up over the back of the wagon rack, and then 2 men built the hay on the wagon up to the top of the wagon racks.
So this was technology too - we didn't have to spend time now putting the swath of hay up in haycocks and we could put more hay in the barn each day.