Ohio History Journal

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THE INTRODUCTION OF FARM MACHINERY INTO OHIO

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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