The Forgotten Machines That Pulled 2 Million Stumps From the Prairie — By Horse Power
After the lumber companies stripped the white pine from the upper Midwest, they left behind 40 million acres of cutover land covered in 200 to 500 stumps per acre. The trees were gone. The stumps remained, roots six feet deep in glacial clay. The machine that cleared them was an 800-pound cast iron capstan powered by a single horse walking in a circle. It wound a steel cable through a snatch block and pulled each stump from the earth with up to 30 tons of force. One test cleared 1,261 stumps in nine days. The cable under that tension snapped often. When it did, it became a steel whip that struck the operator standing over it. Broken bones, severed limbs, and deaths were recorded as agricultural incidents. The men’s names are in county files. They are not in the history of how the Midwest became the breadbasket. The breadbasket was not given. It was pulled from the ground, one stump at a time, by a horse walking in a circle. #StumpPuller #Cutover #MidwestFarming #HorsePower #ForgottenMachines
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