From the August 1, 1936, issue

THE CURSE OF THE PLOW

A superstition, false in itself, is sometimes true in a wide symbolic sense never guessed at either by the people who entertained or those who refuted it.

The plow has been the subject of two strange superstitions in America, one by Indians, one by white men. When iron plows were first introduced, something over a century ago, many farmers insisted on retaining their old, admittedly inefficient wooden implements because, they said, iron plows would “poison the soil and make it unfit for growing crops.”