The real John Deere never got on a tractor
By Maynard van der Galien

What do you think of when you see or hear the words "John Deere"? My guess is that you visualize a green tractor and a picture of a deer jumping.

Did you know that the man whose name is on all those green tractors and all that green farm equipment never drove a tractor? And probably never even dreamed that his name would be on all that equipment all over the world.

You see, John Deere was born 120 years before the first tractors were made. John Deere was a blacksmith. Credit should go to his son Charles who helped make John Deere a real success story. It’s probably the only agricultural manufacturing company that didn’t merge with other companies. And wasn’t bought out. John Deere stayed John Deere.

The company registered record profits last year. Net income for the year was $1.69 billion, up from $1.447 billion the previous year.

John Deere was born in Rutland, Vermont, on February 7, 1804. His father disappeared in 1808 after leaving to collect an inheritance in England. He was never to be heard from again. The ship probably went down in a storm.

With five brothers and sisters, John and his family worked hard to make ends meet. He learned the Puritan values of hard work and honesty, which he would carry with him to Illinois. At age 17, John apprenticed with a local blacksmith, and after four years became a journeyman for another village shop.

As John grew up, Vermont no longer held the opportunities that had attracted an earlier generation of settlers. He made several attempts at starting his own blacksmith shop but always came out on the losing end, once even selling to his employee.

He married in 1827 and his family grew, but all the while he was sinking deeper into debt. He had little choice but to leave his pregnant wife and four children behind and search for better opportunities on the Illinois prairie. His wife and family joined him later.

John Deere not only found work but also new challenges for his enterprising mind. Unlike the sandy New England soil, the prairie soil stuck to both the share and the moldboard of the plow. The farmers resorted to carrying a wooden paddle and stopping every few yards to scrape the sticky soil from the moldboards.

John thought there had to be a better way than the oxen-pulled prairie breaker for farmers to plow their fields. While doing the traditional blacksmith’s work of shoeing horses, repairing wagon wheels, and manufacturing iron goods, he considered how to build a better plow. In what has become American legend, John had an epiphany during a visit to his hometown Grand Detour Hydraulic Mill. He noticed the broken blade of a steel saw and asked if he could take it home.

John cut the teeth off the long blade with a hand chisel and sledge, then heated one small section at a time and molded it with a hammer and attached the steel blade to an iron moldboard.

He attached the moldboard to a wooden beam, to which he added two handles. His 1837 creation wasn’t the first steel plow, and John never claimed to have invented it. Others had bolted used steel to cut the soil, but Deere’s design was the best. His plow stayed clean and sharp and was said to sing as it cut through the tough prairie soil.

John began slowly shifting into the plow-making business. He built 10 plows in 1839, 40 in 1840, and by 1842 John was hammering out 100 plows. In 1843 he ordered a shipment of special rolled steel from England. This steel had to be shipped across the ocean, up the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers by packet boat, and over land 40 miles to the little plow factory in Grand Detour.

John Deere was now producing 1,000 plows a year. John Deere vowed: "I will never put my name on a product that does not have in it the best that is in me".

John Deere died in 1886 at the age of 82.