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The enterprise supplies bread and butter to more than twenty thousand mouths, and is without a serious rival in its chosen field. If the horse tribe could speak, it would arise and whinny pæans to the name of Oliver, joining in the chorus of farmers. For a moldboard that always scours gives a peace to a farmer like unto that given to a prima donna by a dress that fits in the back.
His own personal profit was a secondary matter. In fact, at board-meetings, when ways and means were under discussion, he would break in and display a moldboard, a colter or a new clevis, with a letter from Farmer John Johnson of Jones' Crossroads, as to its efficiency. Then when the board did not wax enthusiastic over his new toy, he would slide out and forget to come back.
Others had tried it, but the sudden cooling of the metal had caused the moldboard to warp and lose its shape, and all good plowmen know that a moldboard has to have a form as exact in its way as the back of a violin, otherwise it simply pushes its way through the ground, gathering soil and rubbish in front of it, until horses, lines, lash and cuss words drop in despair, and give it up.
He tapped the big red ox with a pointed stick, the two beasts settled their massive shoulders to the collar, and with a soft greasy swish and a crackle of half-burnt stubble the moldboard rolled aside the loam. I too felt that this was a great occasion. At last I was working my own land; with the plowshare I was opening the gate of an unknown future; and my fingers tingled as I jerked the lines.
I rode donkey-back through some farming country yesterday and watched the work rather closely. The plows, like those in Korea, have only one handle, but are much better in workmanship. Here they are made by the village carpenter-blacksmith, and have a large steel moldboard in front, and below it a long, sharp, broad, almost horizontal point.
One of his favorite and oft-quoted verses was this from Isaiah, "And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." The Big Idea of chilled metal for the moldboard of a plow, probably had its germ in the mind of James Oliver from this very passage of Scripture.
The farmers by this time were forgetting their former prejudices, and many ploughs were sold. Though Wood's original patent was extended, infringements were frequent, and he is said to have spent his entire property in prosecuting them. In clay soils these ploughs did not work well, as the more tenacious soil stuck to the iron moldboard instead of curling gracefully away.
When a local rival fitted out a plow with a leather pocket tacked on to his plow-beam, and offered to give a paddle with every plow, James Oliver laughed aloud. "I give no paddles, because I do not believe in them, either for punishment or plow use my plows and my children do not need paddles," was his remark. The one particular thing the Big Idea in the Oliver Plow was the chilled moldboard.
The desirable and necessary thing was to preserve the exact and delicate shape of the moldboard so that it would scour as bright as a new silver dollar in any soil, rolling and tossing the dirt from it. An Oliver moldboard has little checkerboard lines across it.
In 1833, John Lane, a Chicago blacksmith, faced a wooden moldboard with an old steel saw. It worked like magic, and other blacksmiths followed suit to such an extent that the demand for old saws became brisk. Then came John Deere, a native of Vermont, who settled first in Grand Detour, and then in Moline, Illinois.
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