History of Lawn Rake

Rakes appeared in the 19th century.

On September 8, 1896, U.S. Patent No. 567,129 was issued to L. Gibbs for a "Rake and Apparatus for Making Same." The patent described the method of manufacturing a rake head made of sheet metal punched with holes to hold "U-shape, tines inserted through aligned pairs of holes, and the U-shape further bent into a round tube." The Gibbs Lawn and Rake Company manufactured rakes in Canton, Ohio, in the early 1900s.

Value

Valuable tools.

While many people own several rakes as a yard tool staple, when rakes were a new gadget, they were valuable and often targets of thieves. Common garden tools in colonial America were the implements of survival. Crops were food and currency, so tools were often stolen. Revolutionary War accounts describe families burying their rakes and garden implements to secure them.

Acceptance

Used on the farm, then on suburban lawns.

In a May 1959 issue of "Popular Science," the history of rakes is presented. The iron rake is centuries old. Farmers would drive iron spikes into a wood strip. The bamboo or flexible fan was invented in the early 1920s and was made popular by suburban lawn care required after WWII.

George McGuire brought a fan-shaped bamboo rake from Japan in 1919. Stores would not sell them because they were deemed "too flimsy." McGuire gave them away to professional gardeners, and other gardeners began asking for the rakes.
The bamboo rakes cleaned lawns of leaves, twigs and grass without harming the lawn. These broom rakes inspired a new way to rake. The garden rakes required a stiff pull action while the lawn and leaf fan-shaped rake required a flexible sweeping action.

Types

Early rakes were spikes in wood.

Early rakes were simple rigid frames used on farms, but the advent of the suburban lawn presented a need for a flexible fan rake. Today, the gas or electric leaf blower has taken over where the rakes have grown tiresome, but the rake is here to stay. Modern rakes are designed for ease of use. A rake that folds in half is not only easy to store, it collects the leaves and dumps them into a receptacle or mulch bin.

Time Frame

Lawn care became popular after WWII.

According to American-Lawns.com, Americans did not take care of their lawns by mowing and raking until the Industrial Revolution. Lawns were expensive to care for and often people would graze sheep and cattle to take care of long grass and debris. The White House front yard had grazing animals managing the lawn under President Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1921.

The invention of the lawnmower, improvements in garden tools and the growth of suburbia led the American Garden Club to call for manicured lawns. They convinced homeowners that it was "their civic duty to maintain a beautiful and healthy lawn." The group was very specific that an appropriate lawn was "a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green and neatly edged."

Potential

Leaf blowers debuted in the 1970s.

Despite the invention of power leaf blowers in 1972 by Echo Incorporated, the traditional rake has endured. Rakes have evolved into folding rakes that gather the leaves, then dispose of them. New materials make the "unplugged" rake more productive and last longer.

References

• History.com: Grab a Rake for Autumn Yard Work
• Historic Camden County: History from the Ground Up
• Earlthodyssey.com: Lawn Rakes
• Popular Science; May 1959: "Some Surprises about Garden Rakes"
• American-Lawns.com: The History of Lawncare

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish
• American Gardening, Volumne 21, Issue 302, page 665