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 crown
E’er glittered on thy manly brow—
No slave would tremble at thy frown,