Pie in the Sky

A CORNFIELD EAST OF BRIDGEVILLE, Del. — If you did not know a machine such as the Yankee Siege existed, you would have no reason to believe it would.

The 52,000-pound trebuchet made of steel and red oak traveled here, to the First State, on the bed of a tractor trailer. Its wheels, weighing more than a ton apiece, are cut from an oil drum 10 feet in diameter. Hanging above its base is a swinging counterweight freighted with several tons of railroad track.

When the machine is ready, and that mass drops, the throwing arm — a spike reaching some 60 feet into the air — goes from horizontal to vertical, and the sling fastened to its tip can launch a 250-pound object several hundred feet.

Steve Seigars, the owner of this elegant monstrosity, patterned it after the siege machines armies in the Dark Ages built to hurl boulders against castle walls, safely out of bow-and-arrow range.

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