| 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. |
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The firm understood that most of its customers owned a horse, usually a general-purpose animal not particularly powerful. But the
horse plowed and harrowed the small fields that, thereafter, were worked by push tools, and if the small-scale farmer owned too much
arable land for a wheel hoe or two, he might buy one of the firm’s “one-horse cultivating tools.” Diminutive by Western standards, the
“tool can be used in the most delightful manner for hoeing a crop closely, saving an immense amount of work in all crops which are
usually hoed by hand. It is particularly useful to the marker gardener and trucker, and to broom-corn growers, and, in fact, to all who
grow crops where hand work must be done.” Accessories and different models enabled growers to cultivate beneath leafed-out
plants, in vineyards, and along rows of sweet potatoes. One very special tool, the celery hiller (first marketed in 1888), enabled
growers to throw earth into celery and so to blanch it. But whatever its innovations, until late in the 1890s the firm intended its tools to
be pulled by one horse.
After the financial panic of the early 1890s, Allen and Company entered the larger-farm market with a two-horse, pivot-wheel
cultivator, but in its 1987 catalogue it explained that its recent efforts had focused chiefly on developing labor-saving tools for
financially straitened small-scale farmers and market gardeners. For the first time, the firm began emphasizing large market gardens
owned and operated wholly by women - perhaps by women whose husbands were forced to work full-time away from the land. Within
a few years the firm had become established in the medium-scale farm market, but it continued its emphasis on one-horse farmers
until massive technological change forced substantial reorientation.
By 1920 many Allen and Company customers no longer owned horses. Instead, they owned automobiles for commuting to work
and, sometimes, for delivering their produce. And very quickly the customers learned the difficulty of being without horses in
springtime, when plowing had to be done when weather and soil conditions permitted. This moment in American agriculture history, a
moment reaching across a ten-year period between 1918 and 1928, passed unnoticed by government-backed experts but not by
Allen and Company. By 1925 it was shifting its emphasis to recreational gardeners unfamiliar with wheel hoe technology, explaining
in a free booklet, A Good Garden is Half of a Good Living, how to manage a very large home garden with little effort and a
combination wheel hoe and seeder. Of course, West Coast competition had begun to destroy the established operations of eastern
metropolitan market gardeners, and the firmed moved swiftly to extol the healthful exercise resulting from pushing its machines -
anything to expand its recreational gardening market. Throughout the 1920s its catalogues edged toward being how-to books aimed
not only at experienced market gardeners and other small-scale farmers but at newcomers - both hobbyist and profit-oriented
venturers. Yet not until 1930 did the firm perfect its ten-year researched response to the horseless one-horse farmers.
Its garden tractor eliminated all need for horse-powered implements, at least on land already in cultivation, and sometimes
eliminated the need for pushed machines, too. The garden tractor boasted a noisy gasoline engine riding between two large,
spoked, metal wheels and pulling the same attachments the firm sold with its pushed machines, although made of steel rather than
cast iron (the garden tractor snapped iron attachments when it crashed into hidden rocks). Proud as it was of the machine, the
company often advertised it negatively, explaining what it was not. “The Planet Jr. is not an all purpose tractor,” it argued in 1930. “It
will not pull a large plow through heavy sod. It will not do the type of cultivation expected of a large tractor.” What it did was replace the
light-duty of the horse. “It is primarily a cultivator of narrow-row vegetable crops, and for that purpose is second to none.” Most
growers, the firm admitted bluntly, used it “to do the work of wheel hoes,” and a few determined large-scale growers used several of
them in concert to work fields of a hundred acres of spinach and other crops, apparently because the men “guiding” them tried much
less quickly than if they pushed wheel hoes, even the Fire-Fly.
Around 1930 the firm realized the diminishing resources of so many of its customers and the fierce competition of the tiny gasoline-
powered cultivating tractor on which farmers rode, especially the International Harvester Farmall and its diminutive successor, the
Farmall Cub. A one-horse farmer might never buy a garden tractor, or might buy a riding tractor, or might stick with an old horse until
its death put him out of business. Many market gardeners simply sold their acreage to real estate speculators, and many hobbyist
gardeners simply did not need an engine-driven tractor of any sort. In the depths of the Depression the firm abandoned its horse-
drawn and engine-driven products and struggled to keep its decades-old pushed products for sale to those pluggers who understood
them to be what they had always been: low-cost, productivity-increasing machines.
However important the tens of thousands of wheel hoes sold by Allen and Company its competitors, they are remarkably absent
from government-sponsored research and educational literature. Indeed, their absence is almost extraordinary. Not only did
experiment stations and other branches of the increasingly massive federal-and state- supported system publish nothing devoted
specifically to wheel hoes, they rarely mentioned wheel hoes in reports on crops for which hoes were ideally suited. No government-
backed expert attempted to improve the wheel hoe and wheel hoe accessory design, or to evaluate models made by competing
manufacturers, or perhaps most important, to instruct farmers and pleasure gardeners in their use. The vast late nineteenth-and early
twentieth-century crop growing literature barely mentions wheel hoes.
> Continued on Page 3. Click here on The History of the Wheel Hoe - Page 3 to continue reading.
The firm understood that most of its customers owned a horse, usually a general-purpose animal not particularly powerful. But the
horse plowed and harrowed the small fields that, thereafter, were worked by push tools, and if the small-scale farmer owned too much
arable land for a wheel hoe or two, he might buy one of the firm’s “one-horse cultivating tools.” Diminutive by Western standards, the
“tool can be used in the most delightful manner for hoeing a crop closely, saving an immense amount of work in all crops which are
usually hoed by hand. It is particularly useful to the marker gardener and trucker, and to broom-corn growers, and, in fact, to all who
grow crops where hand work must be done.” Accessories and different models enabled growers to cultivate beneath leafed-out
plants, in vineyards, and along rows of sweet potatoes. One very special tool, the celery hiller (first marketed in 1888), enabled
growers to throw earth into celery and so to blanch it. But whatever its innovations, until late in the 1890s the firm intended its tools to
be pulled by one horse.
After the financial panic of the early 1890s, Allen and Company entered the larger-farm market with a two-horse, pivot-wheel
cultivator, but in its 1987 catalogue it explained that its recent efforts had focused chiefly on developing labor-saving tools for
financially straitened small-scale farmers and market gardeners. For the first time, the firm began emphasizing large market gardens
owned and operated wholly by women - perhaps by women whose husbands were forced to work full-time away from the land. Within
a few years the firm had become established in the medium-scale farm market, but it continued its emphasis on one-horse farmers
until massive technological change forced substantial reorientation.
By 1920 many Allen and Company customers no longer owned horses. Instead, they owned automobiles for commuting to work
and, sometimes, for delivering their produce. And very quickly the customers learned the difficulty of being without horses in
springtime, when plowing had to be done when weather and soil conditions permitted. This moment in American agriculture history, a
moment reaching across a ten-year period between 1918 and 1928, passed unnoticed by government-backed experts but not by
Allen and Company. By 1925 it was shifting its emphasis to recreational gardeners unfamiliar with wheel hoe technology, explaining
in a free booklet, A Good Garden is Half of a Good Living, how to manage a very large home garden with little effort and a
combination wheel hoe and seeder. Of course, West Coast competition had begun to destroy the established operations of eastern
metropolitan market gardeners, and the firmed moved swiftly to extol the healthful exercise resulting from pushing its machines -
anything to expand its recreational gardening market. Throughout the 1920s its catalogues edged toward being how-to books aimed
not only at experienced market gardeners and other small-scale farmers but at newcomers - both hobbyist and profit-oriented
venturers. Yet not until 1930 did the firm perfect its ten-year researched response to the horseless one-horse farmers.
Its garden tractor eliminated all need for horse-powered implements, at least on land already in cultivation, and sometimes
eliminated the need for pushed machines, too. The garden tractor boasted a noisy gasoline engine riding between two large,
spoked, metal wheels and pulling the same attachments the firm sold with its pushed machines, although made of steel rather than
cast iron (the garden tractor snapped iron attachments when it crashed into hidden rocks). Proud as it was of the machine, the
company often advertised it negatively, explaining what it was not. “The Planet Jr. is not an all purpose tractor,” it argued in 1930. “It
will not pull a large plow through heavy sod. It will not do the type of cultivation expected of a large tractor.” What it did was replace the
light-duty of the horse. “It is primarily a cultivator of narrow-row vegetable crops, and for that purpose is second to none.” Most
growers, the firm admitted bluntly, used it “to do the work of wheel hoes,” and a few determined large-scale growers used several of
them in concert to work fields of a hundred acres of spinach and other crops, apparently because the men “guiding” them tried much
less quickly than if they pushed wheel hoes, even the Fire-Fly.
Around 1930 the firm realized the diminishing resources of so many of its customers and the fierce competition of the tiny gasoline-
powered cultivating tractor on which farmers rode, especially the International Harvester Farmall and its diminutive successor, the
Farmall Cub. A one-horse farmer might never buy a garden tractor, or might buy a riding tractor, or might stick with an old horse until
its death put him out of business. Many market gardeners simply sold their acreage to real estate speculators, and many hobbyist
gardeners simply did not need an engine-driven tractor of any sort. In the depths of the Depression the firm abandoned its horse-
drawn and engine-driven products and struggled to keep its decades-old pushed products for sale to those pluggers who understood
them to be what they had always been: low-cost, productivity-increasing machines.
However important the tens of thousands of wheel hoes sold by Allen and Company its competitors, they are remarkably absent
from government-sponsored research and educational literature. Indeed, their absence is almost extraordinary. Not only did
experiment stations and other branches of the increasingly massive federal-and state- supported system publish nothing devoted
specifically to wheel hoes, they rarely mentioned wheel hoes in reports on crops for which hoes were ideally suited. No government-
backed expert attempted to improve the wheel hoe and wheel hoe accessory design, or to evaluate models made by competing
manufacturers, or perhaps most important, to instruct farmers and pleasure gardeners in their use. The vast late nineteenth-and early
twentieth-century crop growing literature barely mentions wheel hoes.
> Continued on Page 3. Click here on The History of the Wheel Hoe - Page 3 to continue reading.
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