Tools and Trades Tuesday #3

 Pictured Above:

Late 19^th Century Automatic Corn Planter or “Corn Jobber”

Donated by G.A. Ross of Vankleek Hill

1962-069-026  

Welcome to the third edition of Tools and Trades Tuesday. Today we will be discussing the glamorous life of a farm hand and the tool that changed their life, the corn planter, also known as a “corn jobber”. Unlike many other grains of the period, corn needed to be planted one seed at a time. As you can imagine this would be a very strenuous task and would require days if not weeks to plant entire fields, and through the need to complete planting much quicker corn jobbers were invented. The first of these devices were very simplistic and the process of planting the seed was actually performed by the operator himself, but eventually progress was made and soon an automatic planter was in use, like the one pictured above. This is how the mechanism worked:

1. The operator would hold the handle in one hand while their foot was firmly placed on the foot    hold at the bottom.
2. The end with two blades was placed in the ground as the farmhand walked
3. Once in the ground the device was tilted forward slightly and a piece of corn would fall down into the hole created.
4. It was then lifted from the earth and the process could begin again.

This way of planting crops completely changed how much farmers would plant, as you could finish a field as fast as a man could walk it. This could be considered the beginning of the cash crop era. Some old texts from the period give a description of the process and dictate that the work and time of planting a field was cut down by as much as ¾. At the museum we have 3 different corn jobbers that show the progression of the complexity of this device, from the first ones that were hand operated to the final design being automatic.