Every winter, all winter long, drivers on Tolers Ferry Road passing through Huddleston, Virginia, are in for a surprise. Last year it was Jimm-Hay Buffett. This year, it’s Dor-Hay and Nemo; Dumbo has made an appearance; so has Doll-Hay Parton, Rudolph, a mother and baby cow duo, and the cast of the Wizard of Oz. If the name lends itself to a pun, all the better, but either way, the towering sculpture on the edge of Buckscrape Farm is sure to be made of hay.
It all started with a hay-bale decorating contest thirteen years ago put on by the Bedford County Farm Bureau. For fun, Beth Bays built a teddy bear that soared almost twenty feet high. She set up her creation in a field on her farm, near the roadside. Within days, the grass around the bear was dead from cars pulling in to take pictures of it. “My husband thought I was crazy at first,” she remembers. “But when the bear’s head blew off and he chased it down and put it back on, I knew he was on board.” Though the contest fizzled out, the tradition stuck at Buckscrape Farm, and Bays has created a hay sculpture every year since.
Come late fall, when hay season is over, the grass goes dormant, and farm duties start winding down, she gets to work. “I start out making the base, a four-by-five round bale, and then stack more bales on top of that with a tractor,” she says. “Then I sculpt all of the faces and other features with chicken wire.” She stuffs the chicken wire frames with straw and uses landscaping stables to pin the shapes to the bales. Spray painting is the final step. Often, passersby will lend a hand—one year, four men stopped unsolicited and built a doghouse for Snoopy after noticing her struggling—and a trusted friend always lends a guiding eye on the proportions. Usually she and her helpers have the sculpture done in under a week.
Of course, each creation brings its own challenges—Dumbo’s floppy ears, for example, or Doll-Hay’s microphone. For this year’s creation, which went up just before Christmas, Bays had a vision for setting Nemo and Dory in something that looked like a coral reef—and landed on pool noodles as the solution. “A company in Hickory, North Carolina, ended up donating all of them,” Bays says; she made the three-hour drive to pick them up. “The biggest struggle with this one was trying to get those noodles into place to give some movement and texture to it.”
The overall goal, though, is to put some joy in the world. Bays throws a little field party around every sculpture—a musician friend even comes and performs themed music tailored to the creation. “The community just loves these things,” Bays says. “Friends come help or bring me lunch, and people driving by honk or stop and spray-paint with me.” Will-Hay Nelson caused such a stir that news outlets in places as far-flung as New Zealand ran photos of him. A handwritten note Bays found by the sculpture a few years back says it best: “Thank you so much, lady farmer! My mom and I have enjoyed your creations through the years. We love to see what you’ve come up with!”
