What you are seeing here is most often as you correctly identified, making
dowels - not pegs - These dowels are used in making rakes and the like.
> I seem to recall Roy Underhill using a dowel plate for producing
> pins on one of his shows.  He split pieces of approximate size
> with a froe, and then drove them through a drilled hole in a
> steel plate.  I think there were several sizes of holes so that
> he could stage larger pieces to the proper size.
> Hope this helps.
>