THE USES OF WOOD 



WOOD IN AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS 



BY HU MAXWELL 



A GENERAL difference is understood to exist 

 between agricultural implements and farm tools, 

 but the difference is not always clear or always 

 observed. The two classes overlap and it is not always 

 easy to determine which is tool and which is implement. 

 If it is understood that tools are operated by human 

 muscle alone, and implements depend upon horses, oxen, 

 steam, or gasoline for power, the differences are quite 

 distinguishable in most instances. The definition is here 

 accepted that 

 implements are 

 opera ted by 

 power greater 

 than man's 

 muscles, and 

 that tools are 

 intended to be 

 operated prin- 

 cipally by hand. 

 This article 

 deals with im- 

 plements. 



Agricultural 

 tools were in 

 use thousands 

 of years be- 

 foie imple- 

 ments held 

 place in 'agri- 

 culture. Per- 

 haps the plow 

 was the first 

 farm imple- 

 ment, and was 

 drawn by a 

 camel, a horse, 

 or an ox. It 

 was primarily 

 a small, crude affair, wholly of wood, or with only a 

 point of iron, bronze, bone, or shell. Before that simple 

 plow came into use, the tiller of the soil employed a 

 sharp stick, a hoe, or spade, in stirring the soil. No 

 record exists, nor can even an approximate date be 

 assigned, of the earliest use of the animal-drawn plow in 

 Egypt and Mesopotamia. It is generally assumed, but 

 without much historical proof, that the earliest animal 

 plows were in those countries. They may have been 

 there, but some evidence exists that harnessed horses 

 worked in France earlier than we have any evidence of 

 their domestication in the valleys of the Nile and the 

 Euphrates, and possibly they drew plows there in pre- 

 historic times. But while these occurrences, if they 

 really happened, would interest the archaeologist, the 



BRUTE POWER IS EXPENSIVE 



Contrast this elephant and its two operators, scratching a quarter of an acre a day, with the power tractor 

 in the picture on the next page, with a single operator, doing a hundred times as much work and doing it a 

 hundred times better. The old and the new look strange side by side. Photograph by courtesy of the 

 International Harvester Company, Chicago. 



proof is not sufficiently tangible to claim much attention 

 here where a somewhat statistical discussion of the use 

 of wood for agricultural implements has been under- 

 taken. 



American history easily goes back to a time when no 

 plows were used in this country. The Indians were agri- 

 culturists as well as hunters, though that is not the 

 common belief. They grew corn, and garden and field 

 vegetables, and stored them for winter. All the Indians 



did not do so, 

 but those who 

 did not, incur- 

 red the risk 

 of starving to 

 death during 

 the winter. 

 Indians near 

 Chill icothe, 

 Ohio, for ex- 

 a m pie , had 

 h u n d reds of 

 acres of corn 

 in compact 

 areas, and oth- 

 er Indians had 

 corn fields in 

 most regions 

 where they 

 lived ; yet they 

 had no plows. 

 They stirred 

 the soil with 

 sharpened 

 sticks with 

 which they 

 punched and 

 gouged a few 

 inches deep. 

 Their greatest progress in the direction of farm tools 

 consisted in the substitution of copper, shell, bone, or 

 stone hoes; but they had no domestic animals stronger 

 than dogs, and these mongrels were not able to pull plows 

 and never did so. 



The earliest American plows were almost wholly of 

 wood, the same as the plows of that period in Europe. 

 Blacksmiths made the iron points, and that was the 

 only metal in the implement. The early moldboard 

 the part that was instrumental in turning the soil over 

 was of wood in the earliest plows, and development from 

 that primitive pattern was slow. It took nearly a hundred 

 years from that stage of development to reach the present 

 model of the best two-horse plow ; but a hundred years is 

 not long when it is remembered that the plow with the 



