Jethro Wood, Inventor of the Modern Plow.

“When they were about to leave Washington, some friendly members of Congress advised them to deposit the valuable documents which had been used in their suit, including the letter from Thomas Jefferson to Jethro Wood, in the archives of the House, where they could only be withdrawn on the motion of some member. They did so, and left them for some years uncalled for. When at last they applied for them they could not be found. Nor from that time to the present has any trace of them been discovered by any of the family. Thus perished the last vestige of proof relating to this ill-fated invention.”

This is a fair and candid statement, one fully sustained by unimpeachable documentary evidence. Especially by the somewhat voluminous pamphlet entitled “Documents relating to the improvements of Jethro Wood in the Construction of the Plough.” A careful examination of the testimony therein embodied, and of the Congressional Reports on the subject, warrant the foregoing statements.

It is not strange that in an early annual report of the United States Commissioner of Agriculture, that official should have remarked with some bitterness that “Although Wood was one of the greatest benefactors to mankind by this admirable invention, he never received, for all his thought, anxiety and expense, a sum of money sufficient to defray the expenses of his decent burial.” The time long since passed forever to seek pecuniary indemnity; but a debt of gratitude never outlaws, and it is due to the great inventor that his countrymen should gratefully cherish his memory. Every year adds to the debt we all owe him. As the area of cultivation widens, the obligation deepens. Already America is the foremost nation of all the earth in the production of wheat and provisions, the latter being in reality corn in meat form. In exchange for our food supplies, the United States is draining Europe of its gold at an enormous rate, and the fundamental element in the production of American wealth, is our great implement of tillage. American prosperity is the monumental glory of Jethro Wood and his plow.

“The Balance Sheet of the World” shows that the United States can boast more acres of tillage, in proportion to population, than any other country on the globe; and in grain production, outstrips all competitors. Of such a record every American citizen may well be proud, and it should be remembered that without the genius of Wood such a record could not have been made, even approximately. But in order to a just appreciation of the importance of the modern plow and the usefulness of the inventor of it, one should take a retrospective glance, tracing, as best we may without tedious details, the steps which led from the use of a forked stick to the present implement for fallowing the ground. The Scientific American, which ought to be good authority on such a subject, in speaking of the Wood patent, says: “Previously the plow was a stick of wood plated with iron.” If this does sound like an exaggeration, but is really a plain statement of fact, consider for a moment what the plow really is in its relation to civilization.

The savage lives by the chase and upon the bounty of untilled nature. The first steps toward civilization are to domesticate animals, and cultivate the soil with a rude kind of hoe. Both are alike primitive. The next step is to press the beast into service by supplementing the hoe with a plow. In that implement we see what might be called the original strand in the mighty cord which binds in co-operation man, brute and earth. By means of this agency of agriculture the beast of the field is made to toil, and purchases the benefits of human kindness at the expense of idleness and industry. It is not too much, then, to say that the plow is at once “the tie that binds,” and the tap-root which nourishes the world. If by some miraculous calamity this one implement were forever swept away, universal and unappeasable famine would be inevitable. And that occasional famines of a local character are disappearing from the civilized world, is very largely, if not chiefly, due to the improved tillage resulting from improved plows.

We might well say, in paraphrase of a familiar saying attributed to Napoleon: Let me make the plows of a nation, and I care not who makes their laws.

The primitive plow was and is (for the barbarian of to-day is substantially the same in his agricultural methods as the barbarian of antiquity) simply a forked stick, to which is attached by a strip of rawhide or a wisp of grass, a beast, often the patient cow. As the prong passes over the ground, held down by the bowed form of the poor tiller, it barely scratches the face of the earth.

The first improvement was to reverse the stick and notch the forward end. By that means the animal could be more securely fastened to the plow, the thong being tied around the crotch of the stick. The shorter limb ran along the surface of the ground, the notch in front being the only reliance for stirring the soil. In the absence of a compact turf, such plowing would do a little good in rendering the ground fallow, and would at least have the merit of not being so difficult to operate as its predecessor.

The third plow had three parts. It consisted of a beam, a handle and a share, all constructed by simply trimming the natural wood selected for that purpose. In the first plow the prong which served as a share was slanting, while in the third it rested flatly upon the ground, projecting forward, instead of backward, as in the second plow. It could have required no very difficult search to have found small trees and broken limbs, needing no mechanical skill in fashioning, to render them serviceable for such crude uses. They may be termed nature’s contribution to the art of plow-making.

Without going further into details, it may be stated that a standard authority on the history of mechanism asserts that “the ancient Egyptian, Etruscan, Syrian, and Greek plows, were equal to the modern plows of the south of France, part of Austria, Poland, Sweden, Spain, Turkey, Persia, Arabia, India, Ceylon and China; at least such was the case until the middle of the present century.” The Roman and Gallic plows were better than those of the modern countries named. The Gauls had mould-board plows. Pliny is our authority for this statement. That eminent Latin author of eighteen centuries ago, in speaking on the general subject, says:

“Plows are of various kinds. The colter is the iron part which cuts the thick sod before it is broken into pieces and traces beforehand by its incision the future furrows, which the share, reversed, is to open with its teeth. Another kind, the common plowshare, is nothing more than a lever furnished with a pointed beak; while another variety, which is used in light, easy soils, does not present an edge projecting from the share-beam throughout, but only a small point at the extremity. In a fourth kind, again, this point is larger and formed with a cutting edge by the agency of which it cleaves the ground, and by the sharp edges at the side cuts up the weeds by the roots.”

Pliny adds that the broader the plowshare the better it is for turning up the soil. These excerpts from the great Roman may serve to show the utmost reach of invention in that line, until a new impulse, begun in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century, was brought to perfect development in the next century by an American citizen who died the poorer for his invention.

The highest of all authorities upon this and cognate subjects is “Knight’s American Mechanical Dictionary,” and Knight says of Jethro Wood, “He made the best plows up to date.” He adds, “He met with great opposition, and then with much injustice, losing a competency in introducing his plow and fighting infringers.” The same writer defines the peculiarities of the Wood plow with remarkable clearness and brevity: “It consisted in the mode of securing the cast-iron portions together by lugs and locking pieces, doing away with screw-bolts, and much weight, complexity and expense. It was the first plow in which the parts most exposed to wear could be renewed in the field by the substitution of cast pieces.” Considering the source of this passage, it may be said that literature could hardly pay a nobler tribute to the memory of Jethro Wood than this. It is doubly significant, from the fact that Knight’s publishers, Houghton, Osgood & Co., are also the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, in the May number of which magazine a habitue of the National Capital tried to belittle the invention of Jethro Wood, and malign as iniquitous the attempt of his daughters, championed by John Quincy Adams, to secure for that invention proper recognition. It would be quite superfluous to follow this maligner in the details of this, and a subsequent attack in an agricultural journal. He disclaims any design to defame the claimants, but insists that other and earlier inventors deserve the credit for the modern plow. The opinion of Knight’s Dictionary upon the Wood patent has just been given, and the following extract from the same great work sets forth in their proper relations to the modern plow the inventions of those for whom this habitue makes preposterous claims:

“The modern plow,” says Knight, “originated in the low countries, so-called. Flanders and Holland gave to England much of her husbandry and gardening knowledge, field, kitchen and ornamental. Blythe’s ‘Improver Improved,’ published in 1652, has allusions to the subject. Lummis, in 1720, imported plows from Holland. James Small, of Berwickshire, Scotland, made plows and wrote treatises on the subject, 1784. He made cast-iron mold-boards and wrought-iron shares, and introduced the draft-chain. He made shares of cast-iron in 1785. The importation of what was known as the ‘Rotherham’ plow was the immediate cause of the improvement in plows which dates from the middle of the last century. Whether the name is derived from Rotterdam cannot be determined.

“The American plow, during the colonial period, was of wood, the mold-board being covered with sheet-iron, or plates made by hammering out old horseshoes. Jefferson studied and wrote on the subject, to determine the proper shape of the mold-board. He treated it as consisting of a lifting and an upsetting wedge, with an easy connecting curve. Newbold, of New Jersey, in 1797, patented a plow with a mold-board, share and land side all cast together. Peacock, in his patent of 1807, cast his plow in three pieces, the point of the colter entering a notch in the breast of the share.”

It will be observed that the credit given these improvers of the plow is very considerable, without at all trenching upon the exceptional credit due to Jethro Wood. With such an authoritative refutation, the slander may well be dismissed as beneath further notice.

In no way more appropriately can final leave be taken of the subject in hand than by presenting the apostrophe to Jethro Wood from the pen of Edward Webster, formerly associated editor of the Rural New Yorker:

No jeweled diadem or crownE’er glittered on thy manly brow —No slave would tremble at thy frown,Nor at thy footstool bow;For thou wert pure in heart and mind,And strove to raise– not crush mankind!As famed Prometheus of yore,In aid of our lost, wretched sires,Stole from the flaming-sun, and boreDown to the earth those firesThat fill with light and life all space,And mark the Day God’s glorious race —So thy inventive genius foundFor man the bright and polished share,That bids the willing fields aboundWith fruits beyond compare;And from the seed that falls like rainCrowds full our barns with bearded grain!Eternal may the honors shine,We yield with grateful hearts to thee;May children’s children round thy shrine —Sons of the brave and free —With reverent lips pronounce thy name,And build for thee a deathless fame!