From housing tracts to Vietnamese strip malls, today it's hard to tell that
Westminster was once mainly a farming community. That's why it comes as such a surprise to stumble across the
world's largest plow at the southwest corner of Brookhurst Ave. and Bishop Place.
The
Post Brothers' Plow was built by
Charles R. "Hap" Post and
Norman R. Post in 1937 to reclaim farmland ruined by large quantities of silt deposited by the flooding
Santa Ana River. It came in handy again in 1938, when the flooding was even worse. At a rental rate of $100 per hour or per acre, the enormous carbon steel blade pulled Westminster's famously rich topsoil back to the surface.
The plow is 15 tons, 37 feet long, 12 feet high, 11 feet wide, and has a 86-inch blade. Each wheel is more than six feet across. In the photo above, the plow is being pulled -- as was the norm -- by a series of five "100 Drawbar h.p. D-8 Caterpillar tractors."
In addition to restoring thousands of acres of farmland throughout the
Santa Ana Valley, the plow was also used to cut ditches for drainage and pipelines. In the 1940s it served the war effort in Nevada, digging trenches for cables at bomb test sites. (Next time there's a power outage in Westminster, you might want to stop by and see if the plow glows a little.)
According to local historian (and former Westminster mayor)
Joy Neugebauer,
Tom and
Miriam Warne acquired the plow from Hap Post and put it on
display at their "
Rancho Bolsa" as a way to share the area's agricultural heritage with future generations.
