Agriculture
Plowing A Straight Furrow
by Dean Houghton
As hard as it may be to explain to young folks these days, there was a time before the Internet. There was a time before cell phones and apps and instant messages. Go back far enough, and there was a time before television.
In fact, if you turn back the pages of history, there was a time before farm radio reports, a time before electricity, a time when daily rural delivery of mail was only a decadent dream.
That was the time in history that a publication called The Furrow was born. It was 1895, just a few years after the U.S. Census confirmed that the U.S. frontier was settled. Draft animals provided the power needed on farms, and the Second Industrial Revolution was just getting into full swing. L.B. Kuhn, identified in historical documents as a “John Deere advertising man,” developed the vision of a farm magazine published by the company. The Furrow contained pages in which the company could advertise its horse-drawn implements, surrounded by editorial pages carrying information about the latest farming practices. John Deere dealers sent the magazine, under their imprint, to their farmer customers. The U.S. Postal Service introduced Rural Free Delivery in 1896, a commitment to provide daily delivery of mail direct to rural mailboxes, turning them into an information hotspot.