Last October, Katie and I drove to western New York where we visited Rusty O. Junck illustrator Matt Nord and his family. Hanging out with the Nords was the priority of the vacation. But studying the map while planning the road trip revealed another: Jethro Wood’s homestead was a few miles away.

Wood, as long-time Belt Pulley readers know, has often been called the inventor of the modern plow (please see Nov./Dec. 2000 issue), a title he spent the final years of his life defending. Born in 1774, he settled on a farm near Poplar Ridge, NY in 1800 and lived there with his family until his death in 1834. The last I had heard, Wood’s house was still standing near the communities of Poplar Ridge and Aurora, NY, and was recognized as an historic landmark in 1964.

So one bright fall day sharp-witted Matt and eternally patient Katie and I piled into our car and headed for Aurora, a small town on the shore of long and narrow Cayuga Lake. As for actually finding the historical marker, we had nothing to go on save an old newspaper clipping. Reluctant to ask for help in Aurora, I opted to head off into the farmland in the direction I thought Jethro’s house should be in. Failing that we returned to Aurora and started asking the few locals we could find for advice. No one knew where Jethro Wood once lived, nor did they know who Jethro was, or why these people with Wisconsin plates were wandering around town asking strange questions. Tourism brochures for the region forgot to mention anything about farm implements or their related personalities and landmarks. Perhaps we just didn’t run into the local agricultural history buff. The best advice we received was to go back to the first road I’d tried and keep going … out of town. Turns out it was sound advice. I’d given up too soon; before long we crested a hill and were flying past a historical marker declaring a rural house as something significant.

Marked with a cornerstone plaque and a sign near the road, Wood’s homestead is looking well-kept but is surrounded by the eerie silence of an abandoned home. Here Jethro Wood once enjoyed a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. The list of things to see from that vista has changed tremendously in the 175 years since its much maligned owner was fighting to protect his patented plow design.

When so much is based on agriculture and the equipment that helps keep the world fed, Jethro Wood’s homestead is overlooked in a region of the country rich with history. It seems appropriate that Wood — whether he alone deserves the title of plow inventor or not — should be mentioned to grade schoolers along with the contributions of Eli Whitney and Cyrus McCormick and Thomas Edison.

Few would argue the contribution Edison has made to mankind, but most of his inventions are now obsolete. Yet in Louisville, KY, you can visit a well-advertised 1850s duplex where he lived for a year and a half after the Civil War.

Like Jethro Wood’s homestead, most of farming’s hardest workers can be still be found quietly nestled along a rural road ... out of town.