The Plow

Le Roy Plow No 109 – Heirloom or eyesore?
It’s in the eye of the beholder

By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)

To the chagrin of my wife, and the puzzlement of neighbors, visitors, and delivery people, the rusty 100-year-old plow rests on carefully chosen chunks of rock beside the stone walkway that leads to the front porch of our house. It means something to me – not quite sure what, exactly, but something. To others, it is a mystery at best, an eyesore at worst.
    One day I happen to be in our front driveway when a delivery arrives. It is the woman who pushes the button on our new, high-tech Ring doorbell and leaves a big smile with the message, “Delivery from the FedEx chick.” She looks and acts like a woman who walked off a NYC fashion catwalk, stepped into a FedEx uniform, and for some strange reason fell in love with it. She has phenomenal legs and seems to know it, since she wears shorts almost year-round.
    “What is that thing?” she asks, pointing at the plow.
    “It’s a 100-year-old plow,” I answer, “the kind people used to walk behind to plow their garden while a mule did the pulling.”
    She looks at me, seeming to wonder if I’m kidding: “People used to plow with mules? Why?”
    Wondering if maybe she is now kidding me, I cautiously say, “There was a time before tractors, you know? Mules and horses did the pulling.”
    She shakes her head: “Seems mean. Have a good day.”

Forged iron letters on its blade spell out the plow’s facts – Le Roy Plow Co, Le Roy NY No 109 – but there is of course much more to its story.
    On a winter visit to our old family farm in Upstate New York, I spotted the relic resting atop a pile of rocks at the edge of a field it had plowed decades earlier; it was wrapped in brown honeysuckle vines and all but hidden by dried, windblown leaves. It was 15 degrees below zero at the time, so I earmarked it as a spring project. Spring turned to summer, and the honeysuckle had grown into a mountain of green by the time I got back to it. I spent a day battling yellow jackets and intertwined greenery to dig out the plow, then I recruited a neighbor’s help to drag it into my rented U-Haul trailer. The next day I hauled it 600 miles south and positioned it in its place of honor by the front walk.
    “If not for me and a mule named Barney, your family would have starved to death during World War I. You drag me all the way down here and you don’t even have a mule; what’s the point?”
    Good question: What is the point? As a writer, photographer, idealist – and rarely but sometimes sentimentalist – I occasionally get caught up in various flights of fancy. For some reason, it appealed to me to have a plow in the front yard that my grandfather used to feed his family during an era when many families starved – or fled to jobs in the city before they starved. Without that plow, and that mule, and the extra food their efforts provided, my mother – the youngest child in the family – might not have survived, and I wouldn’t be here. People talk about remembering their roots: those are some roots to ponder.

    “I liked the view from that old stone pile. That field was home. I hate people gawking at me. Why didn’t you just leave me there?”
    The design of No 109 had more to do with my grandfather’s farming success that most people would suspect: it’s a heavy chunk of metal dragged by a mule, so how high-tech could it be, right? Answer: More than you might think.
    Edwin Hall, a leading farm implement designer of the early 1900s, added a touch of genius to No 109: it had a deeper groove and a longer cutting edge, which enabled it to slice open ground slightly deeper than most plows, which meant the roots of crops grew more deeply into the soil, enabling them to survive a late spring frost or early autumn freeze. A 10-20% increase in harvest mattered greatly back then.
    At the top of its game in the early 1900s, Le Roy Plow Co was testimony to the success of good design. It was the third largest plow company in all of New York State, manufacturing some 25,000 “walk behind” plows each year. Think of that: 110 years ago the company was making 25,000 plows/year that were designed to be pulled by mules or horses while a farmer stoically walked behind, keeping the furrow straight, and it was only the third largest manufacturer in the state! That era faded as tractors came on the scene, but it is amazing to realize that only 100 years ago most farmers were feeding their families with only a good plow, a good mule, and some rakes and pitchforks and other hand tools. Today it takes at least $100,000 in used equipment to establish even a small family farm.

When I was in my 20s and drove a Porsche, I cared greatly about design and engineering and performance. In the following four decades, driving a series of ubiquitous Volvos 40,000 to 50,000 miles a year, not so much: I mainly cared about affordable reliability, decent gas mileage, and my odds of surviving a wreck. Now that I’m retired and drive only 5,000 miles/year, I again care about design and engineering and performance – so I bought a used Mercedes sedan with seating for five, an immaculate safety rating, and that was designed to hit a top speed of 190 miles per hour when it was conceived in Austria. No one drives that fast, of course, but there is a comfort that comes with driving American interstate speeds in a car designed to protect people at German Autobahn speeds.

I want
to drive
my own car
faster than
200 mph

    Okay, I admit it, that last part is sort of an excuse. When I spotted the Mercedes online – at a price that was too good to be true – some quick research revealed it could be cheaply upgraded to more than 200 miles per hour with a few tweaks of the electronics and some after-market suspension upgrades. Why undertake such a project? I’ve driven more than 200 mph – on a race track – in cars owned by other people, but I’ve never driven one of my own cars that fast. Some people fantasize about shooting a par round of golf, others about going full Hemingway and catching a giant fish: I want to – just one time – drive my own car faster than 200 mph. We all have our vices.
    Returning home from a late evening at the garage, knowing I’ve done all I can to get the Benz ready for its attempt at 200 mph, I’m savoring mixed feelings of relief and accomplishment. I’ve learned quite a bit about computer tuning – the last time I messed with such detailed work I was a teen in the driveway experimenting with different weights in a Chevy distributor to maximize timing advance – and I know the Benz is going to shock some people. The car turned out to be “too good to be true” because it was one of only a hundred made, and even the dealership didn’t realize what they had. So I wound up with less than $15,000 invested in a car that is capable of outrunning some “supercars” that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the event I’m targeting, I know one guy is going to show up with a car that – between purchase price and upgrades – he has spent more than a million dollars on. A computer program says the Benz should beat it by six miles per hour: I’m hoping reality actually delivers that dose of humiliation.
    I step out of the Benz and notice the plow. Glistening wet from a rain shower, illuminated by the soft light of our solar-powered walkway lights, it looks practically resplendent – exactly what I hoped for when I placed it there.
    “When your grandfather was your age, he and Barney and I could cut a furrow just as straight as that yellow line you want to run at 200 miles per hour. And we were actually accomplishing something.”
    I stare at the plow, wondering what it must have been like to eke out an existence on a family farm in that hostile Upstate environment 100 years ago, knowing your family’s survival depends on you and your mule not getting sick or injured. A cleverly designed plow, a tough mule, and tough people who dared lay it all on the line to build a world they wanted: back then, that’s what life was all about.

The angles & curves to make cars faster & stable at 200 mph
came from a design to plow deeper, straighter furrows

    I run my finger along the heavy crease forged into the side of the cast iron plow. That edge made the plow cut just enough deeper to assure a superior harvest; in a different world it might have increased a car’s aerodynamics just enough to break 200 miles per hour. Those worlds intersect more closely than you might guess; there was a time when Porsche was known as much for its tractors as its cars, and the company had to decide which business to focus on. If Hitler had never come to power and commanded the building of the Autobahn, Germans would have had no need for high-speed cars, and Porsche might today be famous for its tractors. Talk about unintended consequences, think about that if you ever ponder, “Would I have killed Hitler if I had the chance?”
    “You did your job,” I think to myself, looking at the plow. “You did a great job. You deserved better than rusting away on a pile of rocks in a forgotten corner of an abandoned farm.” Retirement: outlive your usefulness, become irrelevant, warm your spirits with blurred memories of past accomplishments.
    In a few weeks I will attempt to outrun a million-dollar McLaren with an old Mercedes I bought cheap and upgraded cheap. I might succeed, or I might blow an engine and calmly coast to a stop, or I might disappear in a horrific wreck or a ball of flame like Kowalski at the end of the movie Vanishing Point.

I hope for a much better outcome than that, of course, but laying life on the line was what it was all about a hundred years ago and – modern domesticity be damned – sometimes that’s still what it’s all about today. Even if it is for something far less profound than cutting a perfect furrow to feed a family.

Copyright © 2021 by Paul Clark