A hush returns to lawns

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Powerful, loud mowers have been showing lawns who's boss for decades. But now contraptions that couldn't cut butter without a good shove are quietly -- really quietly -- making a comeback.

Manual lawn mowers, long the 98-pound weaklings of the tool shed, are pushing their way, or, more accurately, being pushed around more yards all over the country.

"It's phenomenal," said Teri McClain, inside sales administrator at the 112-year-old American Lawn Mower Co. in Shelbyville, Ind., which she said is the only manufacturer of reel mowers in the United States. "Sales continue to rise every year."

Phenomenal might be a little strong. Statistics aren't available, but Ms. McClain estimates that 350,000 manual mowers are sold in the United States each year -- most made by her company. That is just a small fraction of the 6 million gas-powered walk-behind mowers that hit the market last year.

Still, that number is about 100,000 more than were sold just five years ago and seven times as many as the estimated 50,000 a year sold in the 1980s, she said.

American Lawn Mower was one of about 60 domestic manufacturers of manual mowers at the end of World War II, when power mowers began taking over the industry, Ms. McClain said. Now, it is the only one making the mowers in the U.S., although some U.S. companies make the mowers in other countries.

Sales of manual mowers at Strosniders Hardware in Bethesda have increased about 10 percent per year over the past five years, said Craig Saur, garden buyer manager at the store. But sales of electric and battery-rechargeable lawn mowers have increased at a similar rate, too.

"In the past five years or so, I think there are a lot of people going to electric [and] battery-rechargeable mowers," Mr. Saur said. "I think that's where the trend is."

At Zimmerman's Ace Home Center in Burtonsville, sales of manual mowers recently have increased by about one additional mower per week -- "slightly higher" than normal, said Edward Beaver, department manager of plumbing and heating. But he said the increase may be attributed to it being peak lawn mower season, a period from late April to the middle of June.

According to buyers and sellers, the resurgence of these quaint reminders of yesteryear is due most notably to growing environmental concerns and an increasing number of women who do the mowing.