i88 Singing Valleys 



by nature cautious about newfangled contraptions. New- 

 bold's plow was practically unknown at the time that a small 

 boy named Jethro Wood, living on a farm on Poplar Ridge, 

 not far from Mountville, began some experiments of his own. 

 There is a story that little Jethro, at the age of five, melted 

 down his mother's pewter spoons and made a plow of the 

 metal. Then he cut bits from his father's boots to make har- 

 ness for the cat. He hitched the animal to the plow and ran a 

 furrow across the dooryard before discovery and punishment 

 came simultaneously. After that, he confined his experiments 

 to wood and turnips, from which he whittled various designs 

 for plows. One of these was his model when he melted iron 

 in a potash kettle lined with clay and made from it an iron 

 plow. 



The year 1819, when the first iron plow was patented, is a 

 milestone in the story of American agriculture. Not that the 

 farmers took to it at once. They did not. Jethro Wood had to 

 give several of them away to make his invention known. Too, 

 American farmers looked even a gift-plow in the teeth. They 

 said the iron would poison the soil and would grow weeds. 

 That it would shorten the hours of labor and turn back the soil 

 in a deeper furrow than any wooden plow could turn was 

 something they had to learn. 



But it was Jethro Wood's plow and Cyrus McCormick's 

 reaper which conquered the corn belt and the farther prairies. 

 Today, when the great wheat and corn farms are plowed by 

 tractors which turn over eighty to one hundred acres a day, it 

 is hard to realize that a gang-plow, drawn by five horses, which 

 could plow five to seven acres a day, was a notable agricultural 

 achievement. In 1850, four and one-half hours of labor were 

 required to raise one bushel of corn. Forty-five years later, the 

 labor was cut to forty-one minutes. That was before the days 

 of motor power on the farm. Today, the United States Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture estimates that one bushel of corn costs 

 sixteen minutes of labor to produce. 



Horace Greeley, whose enthusiasm for the development of 



