“Breakin’ Ground: The Kelly Plow Company (September 15, 2026)
by Scott Sosebee
Like many Texans, I am “first generation removed from the farm.” That is, my grandfather spent a good portion of his life sharecropping thin, hard, and dry too often West Texas plots of land onto which he constantly moved his family in an attempt to make ends meet. For my father, aunts, and uncle it was a hard introduction to life—and one that convinced my Dad that he wanted to leave rural life as fast as possible. That came when Granddad finally gave up the soil in the 1950s and relocated his family to Abilene, where he took up the trade of a mechanic. Thus, my life as a “dazzling urbanite” instead of a “rustic ruralist” became set in motion, if a man raised in Abilene, San Angelo, and Midland can be called such.
PawPaw Sosebee’s lot in life as a sharecropper in the 1940s and early 1950s may have been hardscrabble, but at least he was able to break his land with a precision milled steel plow (he did still use a team of mules), which was more than farmers of the early and mid-nineteenth century could claim. Many of those era’s growers had to “make do” with wooden plows that had not changed a whole lot since Abraham and Isaac sowed the land during the Biblical era. Other, more prosperous farmers could buy and use a cast-iron plow, which had been around the U.S. since Jethro Wood fashioned one in 1814, although it was expensive and often unreliable. Finally, in 1837, John Deere began to build a steel plow in Illinois, an innovation that changed agriculture and began to make the cultivation of crops a little easier.
Given the crude distribution system in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s, the majority of the beneficiaries of Deere’s improvement were agrarians in the Midwest; most farmers in Texas still struggled with crude wooden plows. That began to change when John A. Stewart began making plows in a shop near Marshall in 1843. Stewart’s plows were the rudimentary variety of iron plows, but they were an upgrade over wooden ones, which allowed his profits to grow so much that he moved his operation to Four Mile Branch, just west of Jefferson, in 1848.
The Stewart operation did well, but it began to soar when George Addison Kelly joined Stewart as a partner in 1852. Kelly was apparently a master marketer and salesman as well as a first-class inventor and tinkerer, and the new firm of Kelly and Stewart commenced to manufacturing not just plows but stoves, andirons, and machine castings. Kelly bought Stewart out in 1860 and created the Kelly Plow Company.
The company had done well since its beginning, but George Kelly was now poised to make it legendary. In the same year he took full ownership of the firm, Kelly developed a new plow, the “Blue Kelly Plow,” which was a relatively inexpensive and extremely durable tiller. The new plow became the standard in Texas, so much so that the word “Kelly” became a slang term for a plow. From his now sizable factory in Four Mile Branch—the only full-line plow maker in Texas and the Southwest—Kelly outfitted practically every farmer in the region. In some sense, he and his factory brought industrialism to East Texas, particularly when he turned to the production of weapons for the Confederacy during the Civil War. After that terrible conflict, Kelly made another leap in technology when he took advantage of the presence of iron ore in East Texas and built a smelter for his products near Kellyville, where he moved his entire operation. By the time he died in 1907, George Kelly could boast a business empire. The Kelly family continued to build plows and farm implements well into the 1960s; today the firm name of Kelly Plow remains, but the business is now investments and financial instruments.
Yes, PawPaw Sosebee’s plow was a Kelly, something in which he took great pride. Believe me, if it could cut a row in the hard ground of Jones County it was a dang good implement. East Texans can be proud of George Kelly and what he brought to our region.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee the Executive Director of the Association and can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.