The 'Novelty' Harness That Changed Farm Life
A skeptical farmer encounters a bizarre, iron-framed invention that promises to revolutionize how horses work the land.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The day we plowed our first furrow for the year in the hop yard, there came two young men into my field carrying what they said was a 'novelty harness.' What they were carrying did not look much like a harness, though certainly there was a novelty in its appearance. 'What is it good for, boys?' I said, seeing that one of them was Johnny Rosset, whom I had known since he was knee-high to a duck. 'We will show you if you will unhitch that team and put this on them,' was the confident answer. Now I have a horror of patent-right peddlers, book agents and the like, engendered and intensified by the numerous solicitations incident to the location where I live, but I thought in this case to say, 'Yes, give it a trial.' And, though in a great hurry, off went our harness and on went the novelty. I protest yet, this does not look like a harness at all. Imagine a piece of iron, shaped something like an ox-yoke bottom side up, the curved ends being large enough to loosely fit the bodies of the horses; this suspended immediately behind the forelegs, under the bodies of the horses, attached to the harness by a short iron trace, say about 12 inches long, and held in place by a light cloth back-band, a log chain hitched to the center and back to the plow, and you have it all. Fox and Prince stepped just a little high as they moved off, as if they didn't exactly understand it; but before the first furrow was run they knew no difference. They had not gone ten feet before my mind was made up that there was merit in it. Why, we can use our horse teams right in the brush, logging around, close up to or over stumps; close up to fruit trees, in between hop rows with double teams; in fact, anywhere, as there are no projecting singletrees, no doubletrees. And then, to unhitch, you have only to drop the log chain, just the same as with oxen. This ought to go into general use for certain parts of our farm work. I did not let this 'thing,' as I thoughtlessly called it, go out of the field, but bought it and put it to service at once.
“They had not gone ten feet before my mind was made up that there was merit in it.”
This story captures the 19th-century version of 'disruptive technology.' Just as modern Seattleites grapple with automation and the rapidly shifting tools of trade, the farmers of 1887 were faced with gadgets that promised to bypass the traditional drudgery of the hop fields and timber plots.
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