Ole Ringness was born in Norway and arrived in Texas with his parents in 1852. The family settled first at Normandy near Brownsboro and then at Prairieville. They moved to Bosque County to escape a prolonged drought and an epidemic of disease that claimed, among several others, Ole's youngest brother and grandmother.
Ole was hired as the community's first postal carrier, delivering mail by wagon on a four-day route from Norman Hills, near Clifton, to Fort Worth and back. He purchased some land of his own at Kimball Bend and started farming in addition to his mail route. He did his job, farmed his land and paid attention. Like a lot of inventors, Ole Ringness had a well-developed power of observation.
One thing he noticed was that when the wheel cup on his wagon's axle became more cupped it moved larger amounts of mud. That got Ringness to thinking and it also got him to working. He used his father's blacksmith shop to hammer out on a crude anvil the first models of a disc plow and a disc harrower. He completed it in the summer of 1872, and it seemed to be a winner. His design employed or rows of concave discs that cut and tossed the soil more easily and more acres in a shorter amount of time and was easier to pull.
This was a real "Eureka" moment for a young Norwegian immigrant who was on the verge of living the American dream. He had come to the country as a working lad of little means and by dint of hard work and intelligence had invented something that would change the world of agriculture.
Buoyed by his invention, Ole saved up his money for a trip to the U.S. patent office in Washington, D.C. and a subsequent trip back to the land of his birth. We can imagine how much he must have anticipated making a great fortune in America and the show of respect he would receive from his countrymen in Norway for making good in the new world. Unfortunately, none of that happened.
Ole was scheduled to meet some potential buyers in New York before he went to the patent office but he never made it to D.C. Somewhere along the way or in New York, Ringness was murdered. The fact that he carried with him a large sum of money leads us to assume he was killed as part of being robbed but that's never been established for sure. His body was never found.
The first Ole's family heard of the tragedy came from the Masonic Lodge, who relayed word to the family that Ole was dead. Ole had been the first person to apply for membership to the Clifton chapter of the Masons, which got word of his death from the Masons in New York and passed the sad word along to his family.
Though they could have bought a patent license for $15, the family never pursued Ole's patents and in time the disc plow and harrow was patented by others, who also reaped its profits.
The disc plow and harrow had the kind of impact on agriculture that Ringness had envisioned. It would be hailed as a major advance in farming and would also be partly denounced as the implement of destruction for the grasslands of the Great Plains, which led directly to the Dust Bowl.
One of Ole Ringess's descendants, Ed Ringness of Clifton, donated one of the first two plows hammered out by Ole to the Texas State Historical Association in 1941. There is one in the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin and another one Ole's original creations in the Bosque County Museum in Clifton.
As for Ole Ringness himself, history recognizes him as the inventor of the disc plow even if the patent office never had the chance.
