The Women’s Institute movement founded by Adelaide Hoodless Hunter in Ontario at the end of the 19th-century became a national, and later, an international organization that sought to provide women, primarily rural women, with a means to gain technical and other self-help knowledge and skills relevant to the rural economy, while also providing a secular means for women to socialize with each other. By the middle of the 20th-century, as the numbers of farm families in Canada dwindled markedly in response to broader urban and other societal changes, this organization undertook to document the history of their respective home areas by means of the Tweedsmuir Histories. This undated photo shows a mechanical hay loader conveying hay onto a horse drawn wagon. Devices such as this became relatively common in North America after World War I and were part of a transitional labour saving technology that led eventually to the use of tractor-drawn hay balers on the marsh following World War II. It seems likely that this scene would be viewed as illustrative of the recent past in the context of the preparation of the Tweedsmuir History in the 1950s.