R.J. Gatling. Farmers of the United States! Drill Your Wheat, And Save in One Year $27,000,000!...Gatling's Seed Planting Harrow... Illustrated letterpress broadside. Zanesville, Ohio: Courier Office, circa 1844. Visible 17.5 x 23.5 in., matted and framed to 30 x 36.5 in. Signed in type by Gatling. 

Featuring a large woodcut of a one-horse drill, the seed box stamped “GATLING’S PATENT / 1844,” and bold headline “FARMERS OF THE UNITED STATES! DRILL YOUR WHEAT, AND SAVE IN ONE YEAR $27,000,000!”

A large and wonderfully illustrated broadside promoting Gatling’s “grain drill” as an innovative alternative to traditional broadcast sowing. The text cites contemporary trials: “Wheat, planted in drills 8 or 9 inches apart, will produce from 5 to 10 bushels more to the acre, than when sown broadcast,” and records an experiment by Dr. Noble of Delaware yielding 34 bushels on broadcasted land versus 42 bushels on drilled land (as noted in Genesee Farmer, 1844). The broadside emphasizes the drill’s efficiency—“perform[ing] the triple work of Harrowing, Sowing and Covering at the same movement”—and calculates national gains of 36 million bushels, “amount[ing] to $27,000,000,” while also saving “one peck of seed to each acre.” 

Richard Jordan Gatling (1818–1903), later famous for the hand-cranked Gatling gun (patented during the American Civil War), began his career as a prolific agricultural improver. In the 1830s and '40s, he devised and patented seed-sowing machines for rice, wheat, and cotton, and promoted drill planting for its economy of grain, ground, and time (he also earned an M.D. in Cincinnati in 1850). This broadside documents that earlier phase of his work, when he was marketing his drills in the Midwest, and is a rare survival linking Gatling’s agricultural innovations to the larger story of 19th-century American mechanization.

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