Late 19th to Early 20th Century One-row Walking Corn Planter

 Although it may look simple, this corn planter is a very mechanized piece of equipment. Instead of digging a trench with a hoe and planting the corn by hand, farmers could use this planter and a horse to do the job much more efficiently. Pulled by that horse, this planter dug a shallow trench, dropped corn seeds into the trench, and covered those seeds all in one pass. The mechanics comes in the form of the wheels, axle, and planting mechanism.
 As the horse pulled the planter forward and the farmer steered it with the two handles, the uniquely shaped wheels triggered the planting mechanism underneath the cylindrical box. A rotating plate with holes inside the box allowed the seeds to pass down into and through a small tube to the earth below. The seeds would drop into the trench formed by the blade, or runner, at the planter's front. After the seeds were dropped, the two shovels at the planter's rear pushed soil into a short pile over the seeds. By using this planter instead of a hoe and a bag of seeds, farmers could save themselves time and back-breaking labor, not to mention money and food needed to hire extra farm hands. Mechanization like that found in this planter allowed horsepower to replace manpower on North American prairie farms throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries.