Fresno - Doukhobor Village - Castlegar, BC
Posted by: T0SHEA
N 49° 17.836 W 117° 38.383
11U E 453488 N 5460699
The earth mover of yesteryear, the Fresno found a lot of applications.
Waymark Code: WMFWFW
Location: British Columbia, Canada
Date Posted: 12/08/2012
Views: 2
Its primary application, though, was building our roads. As you can imagine, roads built with a fresno were necessarily primitive, with lots of ups & downs and lots of curves, because the equipment simply didn't have the capacity of present day machines to carve away hills and fill large gorges.
The fresno, or fresno scraper, was also quite handy on the farm, as it could be used to build dikes, dig irrigation channels, level fields, make lane-ways, excavate for building foundations and pipe lines and even pick rocks from the fields.
The Fresno got its name by having been invented in 1883 by one James Porteous in Fresno, California. Its original purpose was to dig irrigation ditches in the San Joaquin Valley.
Fresnos that I have seen in Canada are quite different in design from the original, patented, design of James Porteous, but they're all called fresnos nonetheless.
Though horse drawn for most of its productive life, it was also hitched behind tractors in later years.