| The History of the Wheel Hoe |
| Reproduced with the permission of the author, Professor John R. Stilgoe of Harvard University, from Scientific Authority & Twentieth Century America (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press). NO FURTHER REPRODUCTION IS PERMITTED. You may freely link to this page. |
| Please click here for more info on the Hoss Wheel Hoe |
< Continued from Page 3. Click here on The History of the Wheel Hoe - Page 3 to return to the previous page.
A national figure in the agricultural experimentation and education, Bailey now and then mentioned wheel hoes. His Principles of
Vegetable-Gardening, a very popular textbook first published in 1901 and frequently revised, lambasted the hoe as “a clumsy and
inefficient tool” and praised the “important” wheel hoe. “It saves immensely of hand labor and usually leaves the soil in better condition
than does hand-work.” But immediately after this, his prose becomes vague. “There are a number of patterns, large and small.
Choose a large wheel with a broad tire, that it may ride over lumps and travel on soft ground.” About the benefits of the broad-tired,
small-wheeled machine he said nothing. Indeed, his final sentence suggests a real confusion. “Soil must be in good condition to be
worked with wheel hoes; therefore, they should be introduced for their educational effect.” Whatever the meaning of his last words of
the subject – educate about tilth or wheel hoe efficiency or what? – his treatment of the machines in a college-level textbook aimed
chiefly at aspiring farmers seems at first inexplicable. Why nearly ignore a machine so useful to small-scale growers?
An answer lies toward the end of Principles of Vegetable Gardening, in an outline listing tools for market gardeners. Bailey listed
wheel hoes in two places, under “tool to prepare the land for planting” and “tools for subsequent use.” But it is on a second list of
equipment “for a market garden large enough to be worked by horses or mechanical power” that he lavished attention, suggesting
that a would-be market gardener ought to have two horses at least. His book ignores wheel hoes because it ignores the small-
acreage market gardener, an agriculturist even the USDA admitted made a comfortable family living from as little as three acres.
By the close of the first decade of the new century, a handful of pleasure gardeners largely outside the circle of government-backed
researchers had determined that vegetable gardens ought to be redesigned to make the most of wheel hoe efficiency and that the
wheel hoe ought to be the center of a larger “system.” Systematizing vegetable gardening in order to increase efficiency struck no
one as new, but the notion of the wheel hoe – and to a lesser extent, the scuffle hoe – as the generators of a system did. While Allen
and Company had long claimed that large-scale truck farmers frequently employed ten or more men on large fields, each pushing a
wheel hoe, not until 1911 did one innovator study the efficiency of the wheel hoe in the small, family-sized garden, a space thirty by
sixty feet, “slightly over one twenty-fifth of an acre.” E.L.D Seymour argued in “Economy and the Vegetable Garden” precisely the
opposite of Bailey’s two-horse thesis and demonstrated his argument through the most precise bookkeeping imaginable, accounting
for such minuscule sums as the cost of row labels.
Seymour claimed that his eighteen-hundred-square-foot garden ought to provide all the vegetables needed by a family of four and
ought to consume very little time if engineered for the wheel hoe. Using the industrialist-engineer language of the times, he stressed
the necessity of eliminating “waste” and emphasized that “economy is simply a synonym for the prevention of waste.” Seymour
loathed wasted space and wasted produce, but above all he loathed wasted time and energy. Only the wheel hoe, around which the
pace of the garden is ordered, conserved time and energy. The “adoption of the system of planting in rows instead of in small,
isolated beds” allowed the gardener “to weed and cultivate rapidly, down one row, up another, with no breaking of backs and wearing
away of knees, merely by the propulsion of a wheel hoe or the rapid manipulation of a scuffle. These modern gardening tools – the
second factor in economizing time and effort [after the arrangement of long rows] – and should have a prominent place in every
garden.” He told readers to lavish care on the tools, to keep them in perfect condition, to learn to use them well. “Maintain system in
every phase of the work,” he insisted.
His photographs and sketches make clear that his “combination wheel hoe and seeder” was indeed “indispensable in the
vegetable garden” and “saves time and backache.” Moreover, the illustrations depict what are almost certainly Allen and Company
machines – small-diameter, one- and two-wheel machines for working close to seedlings. Seymour admitted the necessity for some
hand weeding, he suggested that the use of system and wheel hoes would nearly eliminate kneeling. And his precise calculations of
cost – including the property tax on the garden area and the nine-dollar cost for the wheel hoe seeder – suggest that the no-horse
gardener could profit from the systematized vegetable garden. Moreover, his article implies that an even larger are would hold out a
promise of increasing family income - not just a saving on the food budget.
By the 1940s, Depression and war convinced even government-backed researchers that wheel hoes made sense in any small-
farm financial equation, but by then the two-wheel, engine-driven garden tractor and its successor, the rototiller, had reduced many of
the claims of wheel hoe supporters. Yet between 1910 and 1940, thousands of American families more than proved Seymour right,
although their efforts at market gardening innovation passed essentially unnoticed by USDA and other “official agricultural science”
authorities until the Division of Subsistence Homesteads of the Department of the Interior funded several studies in the mid-1930s. In
study after study, state agriculture experiment stations examined the extent and implications of part-time farming, learning, as W.P.
Walker and S.H. DeVault noted in Part-Time and Small-Scale Farming in Maryland, that “small farms are generally overlooked in
most agricultural programs. We have neglected to consider small farms in our public policy. Irrespective of the trend toward large-
scale, mechanized farming, small farms, like other small business enterprises, are here to stay in sufficient numbers to be a factor in
our land policies.”
Surprise spices all of the studies. Experiment station workers made discovery after discovery, and while rarely as outspoken as
Walker and DeVault, often expressed their wonder that so much small-scale and part-time farming prospered beyond the notice of
decades-old agricultural research activities. Iowa researchers found part-time farmers enjoying many more “urban” conveniences,
especially radio sets and toilets, than their full time counter parts; Maryland investigators marveled that: “the amount of food that can
be secured from a small area of land is surprisingly great.” Indiana researchers discovered that many part-time farmers bought a
horse in spring, worked it until harvest then sold it, saving the cost of keeping it over the winter and that many, many others (72% of
the survey sample) used no horse at all. The researchers had burst into an agricultural realm not only of one-horse farmers, but of half-
horse farmers, no-horse farmers, and wheel hoe farmers, innovators beyond the notice of brand name agricultural science and
technology.
> End of book excerpt. Click here on The History of the Wheel Hoe - Page 1 to return to the beginning of the article.
A national figure in the agricultural experimentation and education, Bailey now and then mentioned wheel hoes. His Principles of
Vegetable-Gardening, a very popular textbook first published in 1901 and frequently revised, lambasted the hoe as “a clumsy and
inefficient tool” and praised the “important” wheel hoe. “It saves immensely of hand labor and usually leaves the soil in better condition
than does hand-work.” But immediately after this, his prose becomes vague. “There are a number of patterns, large and small.
Choose a large wheel with a broad tire, that it may ride over lumps and travel on soft ground.” About the benefits of the broad-tired,
small-wheeled machine he said nothing. Indeed, his final sentence suggests a real confusion. “Soil must be in good condition to be
worked with wheel hoes; therefore, they should be introduced for their educational effect.” Whatever the meaning of his last words of
the subject – educate about tilth or wheel hoe efficiency or what? – his treatment of the machines in a college-level textbook aimed
chiefly at aspiring farmers seems at first inexplicable. Why nearly ignore a machine so useful to small-scale growers?
An answer lies toward the end of Principles of Vegetable Gardening, in an outline listing tools for market gardeners. Bailey listed
wheel hoes in two places, under “tool to prepare the land for planting” and “tools for subsequent use.” But it is on a second list of
equipment “for a market garden large enough to be worked by horses or mechanical power” that he lavished attention, suggesting
that a would-be market gardener ought to have two horses at least. His book ignores wheel hoes because it ignores the small-
acreage market gardener, an agriculturist even the USDA admitted made a comfortable family living from as little as three acres.
By the close of the first decade of the new century, a handful of pleasure gardeners largely outside the circle of government-backed
researchers had determined that vegetable gardens ought to be redesigned to make the most of wheel hoe efficiency and that the
wheel hoe ought to be the center of a larger “system.” Systematizing vegetable gardening in order to increase efficiency struck no
one as new, but the notion of the wheel hoe – and to a lesser extent, the scuffle hoe – as the generators of a system did. While Allen
and Company had long claimed that large-scale truck farmers frequently employed ten or more men on large fields, each pushing a
wheel hoe, not until 1911 did one innovator study the efficiency of the wheel hoe in the small, family-sized garden, a space thirty by
sixty feet, “slightly over one twenty-fifth of an acre.” E.L.D Seymour argued in “Economy and the Vegetable Garden” precisely the
opposite of Bailey’s two-horse thesis and demonstrated his argument through the most precise bookkeeping imaginable, accounting
for such minuscule sums as the cost of row labels.
Seymour claimed that his eighteen-hundred-square-foot garden ought to provide all the vegetables needed by a family of four and
ought to consume very little time if engineered for the wheel hoe. Using the industrialist-engineer language of the times, he stressed
the necessity of eliminating “waste” and emphasized that “economy is simply a synonym for the prevention of waste.” Seymour
loathed wasted space and wasted produce, but above all he loathed wasted time and energy. Only the wheel hoe, around which the
pace of the garden is ordered, conserved time and energy. The “adoption of the system of planting in rows instead of in small,
isolated beds” allowed the gardener “to weed and cultivate rapidly, down one row, up another, with no breaking of backs and wearing
away of knees, merely by the propulsion of a wheel hoe or the rapid manipulation of a scuffle. These modern gardening tools – the
second factor in economizing time and effort [after the arrangement of long rows] – and should have a prominent place in every
garden.” He told readers to lavish care on the tools, to keep them in perfect condition, to learn to use them well. “Maintain system in
every phase of the work,” he insisted.
His photographs and sketches make clear that his “combination wheel hoe and seeder” was indeed “indispensable in the
vegetable garden” and “saves time and backache.” Moreover, the illustrations depict what are almost certainly Allen and Company
machines – small-diameter, one- and two-wheel machines for working close to seedlings. Seymour admitted the necessity for some
hand weeding, he suggested that the use of system and wheel hoes would nearly eliminate kneeling. And his precise calculations of
cost – including the property tax on the garden area and the nine-dollar cost for the wheel hoe seeder – suggest that the no-horse
gardener could profit from the systematized vegetable garden. Moreover, his article implies that an even larger are would hold out a
promise of increasing family income - not just a saving on the food budget.
By the 1940s, Depression and war convinced even government-backed researchers that wheel hoes made sense in any small-
farm financial equation, but by then the two-wheel, engine-driven garden tractor and its successor, the rototiller, had reduced many of
the claims of wheel hoe supporters. Yet between 1910 and 1940, thousands of American families more than proved Seymour right,
although their efforts at market gardening innovation passed essentially unnoticed by USDA and other “official agricultural science”
authorities until the Division of Subsistence Homesteads of the Department of the Interior funded several studies in the mid-1930s. In
study after study, state agriculture experiment stations examined the extent and implications of part-time farming, learning, as W.P.
Walker and S.H. DeVault noted in Part-Time and Small-Scale Farming in Maryland, that “small farms are generally overlooked in
most agricultural programs. We have neglected to consider small farms in our public policy. Irrespective of the trend toward large-
scale, mechanized farming, small farms, like other small business enterprises, are here to stay in sufficient numbers to be a factor in
our land policies.”
Surprise spices all of the studies. Experiment station workers made discovery after discovery, and while rarely as outspoken as
Walker and DeVault, often expressed their wonder that so much small-scale and part-time farming prospered beyond the notice of
decades-old agricultural research activities. Iowa researchers found part-time farmers enjoying many more “urban” conveniences,
especially radio sets and toilets, than their full time counter parts; Maryland investigators marveled that: “the amount of food that can
be secured from a small area of land is surprisingly great.” Indiana researchers discovered that many part-time farmers bought a
horse in spring, worked it until harvest then sold it, saving the cost of keeping it over the winter and that many, many others (72% of
the survey sample) used no horse at all. The researchers had burst into an agricultural realm not only of one-horse farmers, but of half-
horse farmers, no-horse farmers, and wheel hoe farmers, innovators beyond the notice of brand name agricultural science and
technology.
> End of book excerpt. Click here on The History of the Wheel Hoe - Page 1 to return to the beginning of the article.
 |  |  |  |
| EasyDigging.com Your source for the Hoss wheel hoe / garden cultivator. A faithful reproduction of the classic Planet Jr wheel hoe. |
 |  |  |  |  |