Sugar cane cart

For those of you who didn't know, I am an American living with my wife and kids in the Caribbean in the Dominican Republic. I am working as a Baptist missionary planting a church in Santo Domingo.

Last week, we went to a beach town called Juan Dolio. It is located an hour or so east of the capital, Santo Domingo, and is a fairly popular tourist destination.

Around the area, there are a number of bateys, or sugar cane fields. Even today a lot of the cane is cut by hand by Haitian immigrant workers. One of the problems with sugar cane is that it is an extremely bulky material to handle.

I haven't been to any of the bateys when they were harvesting for several years, so I don't really know how they are doing it now, but carts like this one were used to haul the cane out of the fields to a light railroad or trucks or directly to a mill where it would be ground into something more manageable.

Although it is in a state of decay, you can see that this cart was pretty crudely made. Now that I think of it, I didn't really see any evidence of any major repairs, though of course, I may have missed them since I wasn't looking for them. I really have no idea what kind of wood this one was made out of. It might have been something like Jatoba, which is similar to Oak, but I really have no idea.

These pictures were taken in front of the Restaurant "El Concon" on the beachfront. If you are ever in Juan Dolio, make sure you stop in for a meal and say "Hi!" to Barbara there. They have a fairly inexpensive menu.

You may download a zip file of more pictures I took of the cart. Note that they aren't of that that much interest unless you are interested in how the cart is put together. Also, the pictures aren't as clear as they might have been due to the fact they were taken in broad daylight and the pictures have some hard shadows.

I am contributing the pictures in the zip file to the public domain. Use them however you want.

Luke Townsley
www.UnpluggedShop.com
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