THE INTRODUCTION OF FARM MACHINERY INTO
OHIO
PRIOR TO 1865
by ROBERT LESLIE JONES
Professor of History, Marietta
College
Ohio agriculture in the fifth decade of
the twentieth century is
a highly mechanized industry, with
almost every farmer having a
heavy investment in devices ranging from
tractors to milking ma-
chines and pressure sprayers.
Contemporary mechanization, how-
ever, is less the product of recent
innovations than it is the culmina-
tion of a long development. When the
Civil War came to an end,
Ohio was one of the many regions in the
United States where farm-
ing already depended on labor-saving
machinery rather than on
the hoe and the sickle. Its achievements
were, it should be added,
not of long standing. The men who deeded
their homesteads to
their sons home from Shiloh,
Chancellorsville, and Chickamauga,
and thereupon retired to a country
village and a life of comparative
idleness alloyed with gardening, could
claim, not unreasonably,
that their generation had witnessed more
inventions and more
significant changes in agricultural
machinery than all preceding
ages combined.
To appreciate the importance of the
changes and innovations
in farming machinery in Ohio prior to
the end of the Civil War, it
is necessary to glance at pioneer
agriculture, with special reference
to the implements utilized therein.
The Ohio pioneer, like his
contemporaries east of the Alle-
ghenies and in the new West, bad few
implements for field labor,
and those he had were mostly clumsy and
primitive. As a rule they
were limited to a few hoes, a plow, a
harrow, a scythe, a sickle, a
rake or two, and a flail.
If the pioneer had a plow, it was either
a wood and iron one
(probably of the kind called a bull plow
or bar-share plow) or a
shovel plow. The bull plow, a legacy
from the late colonial era,
was mostly used to break up new ground,
and sometimes required
four or six oxen to draw it. It had a
beam six or seven feet long,
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