That time a farmer showed me a 200 year old plow under his barn

I was doing a property inspection near Gettysburg last month, old farmhouse built in the 1820s. Guy who owns it now says his granddad told him there was an old plow buried under the dirt floor of the barn. I figured it was just some rusted junk story. He shoveled down 2 feet and pulled out a complete cast iron plow blade, still had some wood handle left. No way that was faked, the rust pattern alone was legit. Does anyone else ever run into stuff like that on random jobs and wish you had a metal detector?

2 comments

2 Comments

piperr586d agoMost Upvoted

180 years vs 200, sounds like splitting hairs to me. That plow was still sitting under a barn floor for longer than any of us have been alive, so it's old enough. Plus, granddaddy stories have a way of rounding up the timeline a bit, that's just how it goes. I'm with you on the metal detector thing though, but around here you'd just find rusty nails and bottle caps 99% of the time. The horseshoe fused into a tree trunk is more interesting honestly, that's a real freak of nature thing.

wade_perez6d ago

Actually, I gotta point out that 200 year old date might be a little off. Those cast iron plows were more of a John Deere invention from the 1830s, so it's probably closer to 180 years old if it's that specific type. Still an incredible find though. I seen a similar thing once where a guy found an old horseshoe that'd been swallowed up by a tree trunk over decades, the iron was completely fused into the wood grain. Makes you wonder what else is buried under these old barns that nobody's bothered to look for.