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 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF ILLINOIS 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 D"5l22c 
 
 lUliniB HISTOMUl mil
 
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 HE GAVE TO THE WORLD THE STEEL PLOW 
 
 BY NEIL M. CLARK 
 
 ILLUSTRATED BY DALE NICHOLS 
 
 18 3 7 * 19 3 7 
 
 • PRIVATELY PRINTED *
 
 PRINTED AT MOLINE, ILLINOIS, U 
 
 BY DESAULNIERS & COMPANY 
 
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 • CONTENTS • 
 
 I A BLACKSMITH 7 
 
 m II 1837 ' RUMBLES OF PROGRESS 12 
 
 > III JOHN DEERE'S ARRIVAL 19 
 
 • IV FIRST DAYS IN GRAND DETOUR 29 
 
 g V THE BROKEN SAWMILL BLADE 34 
 
 tv. VI AN INDUSTRY BEGINS 39 
 
 J^ VII AN INDUSTRY GROWS 47 
 
 ^^ VIII AN ITEM OF MAY 18. 1886 57 
 
 IX "THERE IS THE MAN HIMSELF" 59 
 
 'X 
 
 
 967955
 
 A BLACKSMITH 
 
 IS hair was curly, his eyes steel-blue, his 
 muscles powerful in the glow of the forge fire; and when 
 he heard the screech of ungreased axles in worn hubs, 
 signifying the passing of settlers' wagons, he let go the 
 bellows stick, laid tongs aside, strode to the door of the 
 shop, and, standing ' bareheaded in April sunshine and a 
 leather apron, cast a critical eye over the newest new- 
 comers to the West of golden promise. Even to the ex- 
 perienced blacksmith who had seen many such, they 
 looked a weary, road- worn lot. Five canvas-covered 
 wagons; tired ox-teams, heads adroop; a pack of flea-bitten 
 dogs; Vv^ilted women with small children in the drivers"" 
 seats; bedraggled fowls in crates; half- or full-grown boys 
 and maids peering curiously through flaps of the canvas; a 
 calf or two tied behind; gaunt men afoot alongside; patched 
 harness; worn rawhide whips . . .
 
 The wagons creaked to a halt, and a clerk in front of 
 Dana &' Throop's store hailed them cheerily. "Where- 
 about be you from, strangers?" 
 
 The tallest of the wagoneers made reply. "We're out 
 of Delaware County, New York, mister. Seven weeks 
 and two days on the road, so far, and not once have we 
 slept in a house since we started. What place might this 
 be?" 
 
 "It's called by the name of Grand Detour, sir. A name 
 from the French, signifying the big bend of the river which 
 you see at this point." He waved an arm around. "Have 
 you folks made a choice of place that you're bound for?" 
 
 The tall man cracked his whip idly against a near wheel. 
 "We did set out for a town some neighbors of ours have 
 settled at, called Buffalo Grove. You know it? But we'll 
 be settling ourselves down, most anywheres soon, I reckon, 
 if only to give our womenfolk a rest from the riding. What's 
 land like, hereabouts?" 
 
 "This, sir," said the clerk, puffing pompously as a crowd 
 of listeners began to gather, "is a place created by the 
 Almighty as a special paradise for His children. He made 
 it without trees ready for the plow, but with timber near 
 at hand in groves for every need. He made it flat enough 
 so that no man need stand on his head to farm it, but gently 
 rolling for drainage. There is no part of these United 
 States, I daresay, more delightful to the eye or more salu- 
 brious. You could make no mistake in settling on this very 
 spot or as near to it as you can get. The river that you 
 have just crossed, as you doubtless know, is called the 
 Rock; one of the great rivers in this mighty state of Illinois. 
 Already its bed is being prepared for steam navigation to 
 this point and beyond, connecting with the Mississippi,
 
 and providing an unexcelled route all the way to New Or' 
 leans and even beyond the sea." 
 
 Concluding this lengthy outburst, the clerk did not 
 pause even for breath. "As for Grand Detour itself, sir," 
 he went on, "town lots are already selling here for $100 to 
 $400, depending on the location, and in another five years, 
 they may well be selling for $1,000 to $5,000. We expect 
 to see this place blossom into a great city. Sir, this store 
 in front of which I stand will sell nigh onto $30,000 worth 
 of merchandise this very year ..." 
 
 It was not the first time the tall stranger from the East 
 had heard tall talk. And yet — he loved it. His dull eyes 
 glowed. The sunset, and dreams of fortunes to be had 
 through the magic of a nation's expansion, just as the clerk 
 suggested, were what had brought him and his family and 
 neighbors on their long, hard journey. 
 
 "Is the best land spoken for?" he asked wistfully. "It 
 seemed to us from the last summit that the foot of man 
 had not stepped here as far as the eye could see." 
 
 "Settlers choose the hollows in this country, stranger," 
 the clerk informed him. "You wouldn't see them. They 
 are here, nevertheless. And more are coming every day. 
 The land is filling up so fast, it's hard to believe. But you 
 are in time even now, if you act at once; you may still se- 
 cure choice locations." 
 
 "How is the soil for crops?" 
 
 The clerk threw back his head and laughed. When he 
 spoke again, he addressed the local audience instead of the 
 stranger. "He asks how the soil is for crops !" he exclaimed. 
 "Brother — " facing the stranger once more, " — I'll tell you 
 how the soil is for crops. Scratch the prairie anywhere 
 you like, and drop your seed; and when autumn comes.
 
 you may harvest fifty bushels per acre of the finest prairie 
 corn ..." 
 
 "Yes," spoke up a voice from the crowd derisively, 
 "and when you try to plow the same field next year, may 
 heaven help you! You had better move you on to a new 
 farm. For the plow is not made that will scour in this 
 prairie soil after the first year." 
 
 The mover cast a clouded look at the speaker, then at 
 the plow conspicuously tied to the side of his wagon. 
 ''^That plow," he said, "was made after the patterns of 
 Jethro Wood. I guess you have heard of him. They 
 claim it will turn a clean furrow in any soil." 
 
 "Not prairie soil after the first year, it won't. Nor will 
 any plow. My advice to you, my friend, is to strike north 
 and keep going till you come to timber, or head back where 
 you came from, before you bury any of your time and 
 labor, and maybe your own body, too, in this accursed 
 spot. That's what Tm about to do — go back; it's a lesson 
 that has cost me dear to learn, but the prairies were not 
 made for the plow and crops. If they were, why don't 
 trees grow on 'em?" 
 
 The clerk, a born booster, had been nearly bursting for 
 a chance to chip in again. "Don't you listen to him, sir!" 
 he said earnestly. "It's true that this soil needs a special 
 kind of plow. But we have a man in this town, a mechanic 
 newly come out here from Vermont, who has given study 
 to the matter and will make you a plow that will turn prairie 
 soil, no matter how many times it has been plowed before, 
 and do the slickest kind of a job of it. What do you say, 
 blacksmith?" 
 
 All eyes turned toward the big man with curly hair 
 who stood bareheaded and silent on the fringe of the 
 
 10
 
 crowd. The latter shook his head and smiled slowly. 
 
 ''I wouldn't want to make a sure promise before I knew 
 I could perform/' he said. 
 
 His eyes, however, thoughtfully rested on the far bank 
 of the river. Soon now, he privately knew, he would be 
 ready for a decisive test of an idea that had come to him. 
 His forge fire had burned early and late, his hammer had 
 shaped the precious steel v^th infinite care. He even 
 knew the field, yonder, claimed under preemption rights 
 by Lewis Crandall, where he meant to make his first test. 
 Reflecting so, he was reminded that he still had more work 
 than he could do, and that his fire would be cooling. He 
 turned his back abruptly on the crowd, and went inside 
 his shop. 
 
 "Who," asked the tall stranger from Delaware county, 
 New York, "might he be?" 
 
 "Name of John Deere," said the clerk . . . 
 
 11
 
 II 
 
 1837'RUMBLES OF PROGRESS 
 
 HE United States which the blacksmith, John Deere, 
 knew in 1837, the year of the incident just narrated, was 
 very different from what it is today, after a century has 
 passed. And, though neither he nor anyone else guessed 
 it, the blacksmith, by his own efforts and what came of 
 them, was to be responsible for some of the ama2;ing changes 
 that occXirred. 
 
 The country, at that time, was literally growing like a 
 weed. New Englanders by the thousands had packed 
 up and headed for the sunset. From overseas, from 
 Germany, Ireland, and the Scandinavian countries par' 
 ticularly, more were coming on every ship. The great 
 West, with its lure and promise, and with more than little 
 boisterousness, had burst with full force upon the con' 
 
 12
 
 sciousness of the older part of the young nation. Already 
 it had given the uneasy and more conservative East a presi' 
 dent, in the person of Andrew Jackson. "Old Hickory'"* 
 was even then completing his second term in office. 
 
 . In Illinois, Indian warfare was only just over. Barely 
 five years before, a physically powerful but ungainly cap' 
 tain of volunteer troops raised to repel the tomahawk'and' 
 fire invasion of the old Sac chieftain, Blackhawk, had march' 
 ed through country very close to where the blacksmith's 
 forge in Grand Detour stood; and once, not knowing the 
 proper command to deploy his men upon approaching a 
 narrow gate, had relied on the wit of the prairies and said: 
 
 "This company is dismissed for two minutes, when it 
 will fall in again on the other side of the gate." 
 
 That captain's name, unknown as yet to more than a 
 few, was Abraham Lincoln . . . 
 
 The right or wrong of slavery was more and more being 
 discussed. Abolitionists were crying their fiery wares. 
 When certain citi2;ens of Maine allegedly abducted a slave 
 from Georgia, and the governor of Maine refused to sur' 
 render the abductors to the governor of Georgia, the 
 Illinois Legislature took official notice of the incident by 
 resolving: "that ... a free state or its citiziens ought 
 not to interfere with the property of slaveholding states." 
 
 Travel was still mostly by wagon or horseback, stage' 
 :oach, canal boat, lake or river steamer, and sailing schooner. 
 Railroads were just beginning. Projects for them were 
 in the air everywhere. "Internal improvements" was a 
 magic phrase with legislators, and millions of dollars had 
 been voted or were about to be voted in Illinois for canal 
 construction, river improvement, railroad construction. 
 
 13
 
 Life had begun to be speedier, more tense, more exciting 
 than in the Colonial period. Men stepped faster. Most 
 of them dreamed of fortunes waiting to be made by any 
 one who ''struck it right."" Boasting was becoming almost 
 a universal habit; braggart talk hit the sky and bounced. 
 The land speculator had his day and lived in pink clouds 
 of glory. "100 Town Lots," one of them, named Gay, 
 advertised in the Sangamo Journal on August 5, 1837, 
 hoping to lure buyers to his private town, Huron. ''In 
 the event of the construction of the canal," the optimistic 
 real estater declared, "Huron will possess the advantages 
 of an immense water power that cannot fail to build it up 
 at once into a flourishing and populous town." (Today, 
 this place of fabulous possibilities does not exist on the 
 Illinois map!) 
 
 But men, like trout, rose greedily to such lures. Land 
 hunger was universal. It was reckoned the speedy way to 
 wealth. Those who had capital to invest, bought large 
 tracts and held for the rise that an influx of population 
 was expected to bring. There was high precedent for the 
 practice. George Washington, himself, at one time had 
 held more than 200,000 acres of western lands, anticipating a 
 speculative return. Patrick Henry's land holdings made him 
 wealthy. Robert Morris, financier of the Revolution and 
 the country's second-richest man, bought millions of acres 
 and multiplied his fortune by selling on the advancing market. 
 
 For those who had little or nothing to invest, save 
 muscle and will, it was a hard, pioneer life. Charles 
 Dickens, making his first American tour in 1842, was 
 appalled and disgusted at the swampy villages he saw, 
 the practice of tobacco spitting, and inconvenience (to 
 him) of stage coaches, canal boats, river steamers, frontier 
 hotels. The great novelist failed to comprehend the epic 
 
 14
 
 movement under these crudities. Peter Cartwright, 
 famous itinerant Methodist minister of that day in north' 
 western Illinois, eyed them more sympathetically. He 
 described the life: ''"New settlements, formed and form' 
 ing; hard, long rides, cabin parlors, straw beds and bed' 
 steads made out of barked saplings, and puncheon bed' 
 cords. But . . . the men were a hardy, industrious, 
 game'catching and Indian-driving set. The women were 
 also hardy; they would think no hardship of turning out 
 and helping their husbands raise their cabins, if need be; 
 they would mount a horse and trot ten or fifteen miles to 
 meeting, or to see the sick and minister to them, and home 
 again the same day." 
 
 If talk among these poorer folk who did the spade work 
 of pioneering was often big, it helped to bolster spirits like 
 whistling in the dark. And besides, the dullest could see 
 that under the froth was substantial drink, behind the 
 bragging was enough glittering performance to persuade 
 each newcomer that he might receive fortune's next kiss. 
 Even a poor man might become rich if he were a good 
 picker. Had not Astor, who landed almost penniless in 
 New York, died worth $20,000,000? Had not miserly 
 Stephen Girard amassed $6,000,000? Town lots in the 
 mudhole called Chicago might sell at the utterly ridiculous 
 figure of $100 per front foot, but who could say that even 
 that was too high a price to pay? Had not Gurdon S. 
 Hubbard, ex'Vermonter, in 1835 became part owner of an 
 SO-acre tract there, near the center; and had he not, a few 
 months later, sold half of it for $80,000? The wildest 
 dreams might not be too wild . . . 
 
 Already, too, the era of invention, which was to make 
 the Nineteenth Century so notable, had begun. Fulton's 
 
 15
 
 first steamboat had traveled successfully up the Hudson in 
 1807, and a quarter of a century later the tonnage of steam' 
 boats operating on the Mississippi and tributary western 
 waters, was nearly half that of the whole British empire. 
 Eli Whitney's cotton gin was revolutioni2iing the South's 
 chief agricultural industry. The telegraph had not yet ar' 
 rived but was soon to come. Trains built to travel at the 
 dizzy speed of ten miles per hour, were already hauling 
 thousands of adventurous spirits who dared to ride on them. 
 The first postage stamp, early symbol of a new era of more 
 rapid communications, was issued in England in 1840, and 
 the idea was to be adopted in the United States seven years 
 later. 
 
 Yet, despite all the bustling activity, the transformations 
 later credited to invention and industrializ^ition had little 
 more than begun. Manufacturing was in its infancy. 
 New England factory owners worked girl employees twelve 
 and fourteen hours, from five in the morning till seven at 
 night, and piously protested against any reduction in hours, 
 saying that the morals of the girls would certainly suffer 
 '"'if longer absent from the wholesome discipline of factory 
 life" ! The hardware store of today was still a thing of the 
 far future. Hundreds of machine-made articles utterly 
 common now were unknown then. Kitchen knives, and 
 nearly all utensils of household and everyday use, were still 
 made to individual order by the local blacksmith. Indeed, 
 the blacksmith was one of the most important individuals in 
 every community, ranking but little below the flour miller 
 and the sawmill owner. 
 
 The nation was still overwhelmingly agricultural, too. 
 Three years later, in 1840, the census was to show a total 
 working population of 4,798,000, of which 3,719,000 were 
 engaged in agriculture; and even so, the nation was not 
 
 16
 
 agriculturally self-sufficing. The time was yet distant 
 when the efforts of a single farmer, multiplied many fold by 
 machinery, could produce enough to support far more 
 people than the members of his immediate family. In 
 1840, a farmer plowed only about an acre a day; he could 
 cradle and bind only about an acre of wheat; and he did 
 other work at a similar rate. Figures have been compiled to 
 show that in the year 1930, assuming that a farmer used the 
 most modern equipment available in that year, the major 
 operations in growing and harvesting an acre of wheat 
 yielding 20 bushels, required total labor of but 3.3 man- 
 hours. But in 1830, with the most modern equipment 
 then available, the same production called for 57-7 naari' 
 hours of labor. These studies also show that if the price 
 of wheat were $1 per bushel in both years, the farmer's 1930 
 net cash return per acre was $6.06, whereas his 1830 net 
 cash return was only 34.7 cents. 
 
 Such changes a century — an invention — were destined 
 to effect. 
 
 The fact is that, in 1837, agricultural implements were 
 little changed from ancient and medieval times. A plow 
 man of the time of Christ, scratched the soil of Egypt or 
 Roman Italy with an implement not much cruder than 
 many farmers were using for plows in the United States in 
 the years when Andrew Jackson was president. The har- 
 vesting of crops then and in ancient times was also about 
 equally crude. The wheat farmer used a walking plow, a 
 sack over his shoulder instead of a drill, brush instead of a 
 harrow, a sickle, flail, and forks for threshing and stacking, 
 and shovel, sheet, and measure for winnowing. But . . . the 
 rumble of great changes had begun to be heard. Invention 
 was about to wave its magic wand. Already, in the year 
 
 17
 
 1831, Cyrus McCormick had invented a mechanical reaper 
 to cut grain, and it actually worked. And, in the year 1837, 
 in the little village of Grand Detour, on the banks of the 
 Rock River in Illinois, John Deere in his tiny blacksmith 
 shop . . . 
 
 18
 
 JOHN DEERE'S ARRIVAL 
 
 AIT ! Who was this blacksmith, Deere? Whence 
 had he come? What was he doing on a frontier where so 
 short a time before, the Indian war whoop had curdled the 
 blood of far 'Scattered first settlers? 
 
 To be brief about it, he was a V^pQonter who was born 
 on FebruarX-7»J!:§Q4, in the village of Rutland, the son of 
 William Ryland Deere, a merchant tailor who had come to 
 the United States from England, and of Sarah Yates Deere, 
 the daughter of a British soldier who fought the Yankees in 
 the Revolutionary War but stayed to become a citizen 
 among them when the war was over. Though Rutland 
 was John Deere's place of birth, he lived from the beginning 
 of conscious memory, and during all his early formative 
 years, and until he was of voting age and past, in Middle' 
 bury, a few miles from Rutland, northerly down the valley 
 of Otter Creek. Here, the boy grew up and became a man. 
 
 19
 
 Here his character was set in the mold it was to take and 
 keep. Vermont shaped him . . . before the West took him. 
 
 Middlebury lies in rough country surrounded by hills. 
 A boy on an occasional day of freedom could climb and look 
 out over a tumbled, irregular landscape, with a procession 
 of mountains, Breadloaf, Grant, Abraham, Ellen, ten miles 
 to the East; and to the west, the blue of Lake Champlain. 
 His eye could pick out, in far 'flung oceans of green, great 
 island wastes of "deadening s" — for where once this all had 
 been continuous forest, farmers had girdled trees by the 
 millions to kill them and let the sunshine in, so they could 
 scratch the ground and plant. Winters in that country 
 were long and howling with snow, bitter with cold. In 
 February or March, a boy exploring in the woods might 
 find a sugar camp and linger in warmth by the fire to watch 
 the sap "boil down," and to get a taste of the maple sweet' 
 ness. In summer. Otter Creek, slothful for most of its 
 ninetymile length, slow to reach flood stage after rains and 
 thaws, but swift enough in the rapids at Middlebury, fur' 
 nished a boy the swimming and fishing he wanted. And 
 (important to the growing boy as a sense of responsibility 
 began to develop) the Creek furnished excellent sites for 
 factories and "mechanic establishments." 
 
 John Peere was eight when his father left his family at 
 Middlebury and set out for England. Why he did so is not 
 entirely clear. One tradition is that he went to claim an 
 inheritance; another, that he went to buy goods for his 
 tailoring shop. No matter. He went. While waiting 
 at the port for his ship to sail, he sat down, perhaps with a 
 tight lump in his throat, to write a letter to his little boy, 
 John, youngest of his four children. 
 
 "Take good care of your mother," he said. 
 20
 
 The letter, quaint and formal, has been preserved. It 
 was the last word the family ever received. William 
 Deere's trunk arrived in England. But he himself was not 
 aboard. Was he swept overboard in a gale? Did some 
 other strange mishap overtake him in those days when 
 vessels spent weeks, sometimes months, crawling across the 
 treacherous Atlantic under sail? Neither widow nor son 
 ever knew. 
 
 Sarah Deere carried on her husband's shop. When 
 John was a grown man, Sarah died, in 1826. But long before 
 her death, he had begun to take his destiny firmly into his 
 own hands. Unknown to her, he obtained work grinding 
 bark for a Middlebury tanner, and surprised her by bring' 
 ing home a pair of shoes and a suit of clothes as pay. She 
 had wanted him to study at Middlebury College which 
 was one of the two higher institutions of learning in Ver' 
 mont at that time; and he did so for a very brief time. But 
 a sense of the practical rather than the theoretical asserted 
 itself in him strongly even then, and almost at once he chose 
 another kind of training by apprenticing himself to a certain 
 Captain Benjamin Lawrence of Middlebury, to learn the 
 blacksmith trade. 
 
 Earlier, we commented briefly on the importance of the 
 blacksmith in the economy of the nation a hundred years 
 ago. He was as ubiquitous as the garage mechanic of the 
 present day, and even more necessary; for he forged the 
 tools needed for the very maintenance of life. He shod the 
 oxen — hoisting them clumsily aloft in his ox-frame, and 
 fastening their vicious hoofs during the process. He 
 made the ox'shoes, even the nails. He did the iron work 
 on wagons, carriages, stagecoaches. Whatever was to be 
 wrought in iron, he wrought. A community was fortunate 
 
 21
 
 / 
 
 to have a blacksmith who, having learned well his trade, 
 honored it by honest practice. 
 
 Captain Lawrence was such a blacksmith, a strict master, 
 but the kind for a boy to have; and John Deere proved an 
 apt apprentice. His wages were such as were paid to 
 apprentices at that time; $30 for the first year, and $35, $40, 
 and $45 respectively for the succeeding years. Under his 
 master's eye, he acquired the art of making his forge fire 
 neither too great nor too small. He learned the maxim, 
 "Strike while the iron is hot" — and the reason for it. He 
 discovered why it was better always to finish a job on the 
 first heat, if possible, and to avoid reheating. He learned 
 that it was not how hard the blow of the hammer that 
 mattered, but how true. Skilled workmanship was the 
 master's creed, and became the boy's delight. He gained 
 proficiency in sharpening farmers' plowshares, shaping axe- 
 heads, repairing scythe knives. He took even more pleasure 
 in fashioning new tools, better adapted for familiar tasks. 
 He could, in a word, do more than make sparks fly from the 
 anvil. He could create . . . 
 
 John Deere's apprenticeship ended in 1825, and for the 
 next ten years he worked for others or in shops of his own 
 in various parts of Vermont, never staying very long in one 
 place, and never straying very far from his birthplace. His 
 first job was with Wm. Wills and Ira Allen of Middlebury, 
 and his v^ges were $15 per month. The following year, he 
 traveled north as far as Burlington, then a mere village, 
 where he was employed to do the wrought'iron work on a 
 sawmill, and later on a flaxmill. After that, he was a 
 partner for a while in a shop at Vergennes, a busy town of 
 stone stores and the pleasant sound of industry along the 
 • waterfront; it was located near the mouth of Otter Creek 
 
 22
 
 and the shore of Lake Champlain, and proudly called itself a 
 seaport. And then he had shops of his own at Leicester 
 and Hancock. It was during these years of frequent moves 
 that he more or less broke from the strict routine of ordinary 
 blacksmi thing (shoeing horses "all around" for $1) and began 
 to design and make tools not only to order, but also for sale, 
 foreshadowing what was to come later. The United 
 States was emerging into a new industrial era; John Deere 
 moved on the manufacturing tide. His shovels, hoes, and 
 pitchforks were coveted by Vermont farmers because they 
 were sturdy and handled easily. Late in life, on a visit to 
 that state, he was delighted to discover some of the very 
 shovels he had wrought, and to learn that they had seen 
 steady service for nearly threc'score years. He also made hay 
 forks and manure forks, anticipating demand and keeping 
 them in stock. 
 
 At Burlington, at Vergennes, and often in the travels 
 occasioned by his trade, John Deere looked out over the 
 waters of Lake Champlain, saw the black smoke of early 
 steamboats, caught in his nostrils the scent of wide lands 
 beyond. In his shops, on the road, he often heard news 
 about the canal which had been dug, and of boats which 
 sailed direct from Whitehall on lower Lake Champlain, to 
 Waterford or Troy on the Hudson; and of the still greater 
 canal with which it connected, the Erie, which DeWitt 
 Clinton had pushed boldly right across the state of New 
 York, connecting the city of New York v/ith the Great 
 Lakes by water, reducing freight rates fabulously from $100 
 per ton to $5, carrying uncounted thousands of settlers into 
 the great fertile West, bringing golden tales back as well as 
 wheat, flour, pork, potatoes, lumber, and other pi:oducts of 
 the market-hungry West. Vermont heard these tales; 
 many were stirred with a vague unease of their own hard 
 
 23
 
 climate and soil. It was slow, hard work getting ahead in 
 that grim region. John Deere heard the tales, and he, too, 
 was stirred. 
 
 Then, of a sudden, the West was brought very close to 
 him. A Vermont ex'major, Leonard Andrus, sold his 
 store and went out to Illinois in search of better health and 
 a sight of the country. Andrus struck out with a party 
 bound from St. Louis to the famous lead mines located in the 
 northwestern part of the state, at Galena. But he left 
 them about midway. In the neighborhood of the Rock 
 River, he touched a section of country in which scarcely 
 any white man then was dwelling. He decided to explore 
 it. He may have smoked a pipe with John Dixon, who 
 kept the ferry and a combined tavern and store at the 
 junction of Kellogg's Trail and the trail from Chicago; and 
 from Dixon, he may have gleaned much information about 
 the Indians and how they had been pacified, and how the 
 land was rich and hungry for settlers. He paddled on up' 
 river, past wooded islands and bluffs and, eventually, landed 
 at the spot which even then was called Grand Detour. He 
 saw the abandoned shack of an old-time fur trader, one 
 LaSallier; but no other white man's dwelling. Friendly 
 Winnebago Indians gathered around while he cooked his 
 supper. The peace of the prairies entered into his soul. 
 Their promise persuaded him. 
 
 "Here," he said to himself, ''I will build a city." 
 
 That was the year 1834. 
 
 He went back to Vermont and told friends many glowing 
 tales of what he had seen, and of the particular spot he had 
 chosen for a settlement. A few of them were induced to 
 come out with him when he returned the following year to 
 this new Eden. One of these was the man who became 
 
 24
 
 his fathei'iri'law, Amos Bos worth. Now, Amos was the 
 owner of a stagecoach and freighting business, and John 
 Deere did work for him. They were close friends. They 
 talked the venture over together. If Amos Bosworth 
 could pick up and go in this fashion, why not he? . . .Thus, 
 from man to man, passed the contagion of the new West. 
 
 All details of John Deere's trip to the West, which he 
 undertook in the year 1836, are lost in the terse description 
 which he himself gave of it many years later— "by canal and 
 the lakes to Chicago." Yet, that trip must have been as full 
 of color and vivid life and strangeness for him as was the 
 first exploration of Antarctica for Admiral Byrd. He went 
 alone. He had been married, in 1827, to Demarius Lamb, a 
 girl from the town of Granville over east of the Middlebury 
 Mountains. But he left her at home while he went ahead 
 to see whether he should bid her follow. We may imagine 
 his journey; the busy waters on which he traveled across 
 New York state — crowded packet boats of 40 tons, drawing 
 8 inches of water, and ''replete with elegant accommoda^ 
 tions" for travelers — the haunting horn of the steersman 
 ("snarling his horn in his chin whiskers and blowing like 
 they'd reelected Jackson!") heard at all hours calling for 
 lock tenders to let the boat through— the crack of the 
 blacksnake whip over the backs of straining mules on the 
 towpath — other boats, packets or freighters, passed or 
 passing, vaguely seen in mist or at night, cabins lighted, 
 smoke trailing, the smell of cooking — the wonder of the 
 great aqueduct over the Genesee River, 802 feet long — 
 the Cayuga marshes, often flooded and impassable — odors 
 of strange cargoes — heroic fights staged by ambitious bullies 
 of the big ditch — songs : 
 
 'Tve got a mule, her name is Sal, 
 "Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal. 
 
 25
 
 "She's a good old worker and a good old pal, 
 "Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal ..." 
 And at last, Buffalo, the first sight of the wide waters of 
 Lake Erie, white steamers leaving for the further West, 
 others arriving from the West . . . bustle, hope, big talk, 
 big doings, a nation on the move. 
 
 The blacksmith from Vermont, thirty-two, mighty of 
 muscle, steady of eye, fired with ambition and hope, stood 
 along the canal-boat rail en route and heard such conversa- 
 tion as this : 
 
 "It's powerful easy on these waters for you an' me today, 
 stranger. We just float an' git thar. But I can tell you 
 we sweat in the building of the big ditch a do2;en years ago." 
 
 "Aye?" 
 
 "Aye. I had the contract for this very stretch. Shovels, 
 axes, spades, wheelbarrows, scrapers — that's all we had to 
 work with, an' they was too benightedly slow for us. We 
 had to cut through matted tree roots two inches thick. 
 Millions of 'em. Yes, sir! I myself, sir, had a plow built — " 
 
 "A plow?" 
 
 "A plow, sir, the like of which was never seen before. 
 With a colter ahead of the share. Took three teams of 
 oxen to draw it. A regular master of a plow. Oh, we 
 went through. But the grief we had! The colters and 
 shares we ruined!" 
 
 A better plow. The blacksmith was interested in that . . . 
 
 Beyond the Erie Canal, John Deere sailed up the lakes 
 past Detroit, through the Straights of Mackinac, down to 
 Chicago. Already, this remote village was beginning to 
 boom. In that year, the arrivals of vessels numbered 49 
 steamboats and 383 sailing ships. A census to be taken on 
 
 26
 
 July 1, 1837, disclosed a population of 3,989 whites and 77 
 blacks, plus "104 sailors belonging to vessels owned here." 
 There were 398 dwellings, 29 dry goods stores, 19 grocery 
 and provision stores, 26 groceries (dispensing drink), 17 
 lawyers' offices, 5 churches. The mud's depth varied with 
 the weather, but was always spectacular. John Deere 
 took a good look at the marshy town, whiffed it, disap' 
 proved. They would have been glad to keep him there. 
 Skilled mechanics were scarce. But he hurried on by the 
 westerly road, the road that was little more than the wagon 
 ruts worn by the Army during the Blackhawk War. And 
 so, some time irf 1836, he arrived at the settlement founded 
 by Andrus and his friends at Grand Detour. 
 
 He arrived with $73.73 in his pockets; part of this modest 
 sum in the big copper cents of the day, measuring Vyi 
 inches across, and in the copper half'cents which w^ere but 
 little smaller. Some of the prices at the time were as 
 follows : 
 
 Ferry fare (man afoot) 12j^ cents 
 
 Meal of viotualff T 373^ cents 
 
 Night's lodging (tavern) 25 cents 
 
 Butter (pound) 12 to 18 cents 
 
 Sugar (pound) 4K to 15 cents 
 
 Potatoes (bushel) 50 cents 
 
 Candles (do2;en) 31 >^ cents 
 
 "Thick boots" (pair) $4 
 
 Hat $1 and a shilling 
 
 To his new home John Deere came, perhaps on a summer 
 evening, while a black crow in the twilight winged toward a 
 lightning'riven oak. Perhaps a whippoorwill called. Gen' 
 tians, blue and purple, and snowy'white asters bloomed 
 underfoot. Dim candlelight glowed from the windows of 
 
 27
 
 the tiny settlement. Men in homespun gathered in eager 
 talk on the stoop of the store. Over all, like a blanket, 
 hung the quiet of the great prairies. A quiet, however, 
 that was quiveringly aware of the kick of the future in the 
 womb of the present. 
 
 A century has passed since his coming. Grand Detour is 
 still a tiny village snuggled in the bent elbow of the river. 
 It drowses now, whether under summer suns or winter 
 snows, asking only to be undisturbed. But then, it lay in 
 the direct path of a United States coming of age, in the very 
 rip tide of invincible advance . . . 
 
 28
 
 IV 
 
 FIRST DAYS IN GRAND DETOUR 
 
 OHN DEERE brought the tools of his trade with him, 
 or at least those most essential; for no sooner had he arrived, 
 than he was asked to repair a broken pitman shaft in the 
 sawmill on Pine Creek nearby. He needed a forge for this, 
 and there was none. So he built one in a hurry, using 
 stones picked up along the river; clay serving for mortar. 
 Within two days, the shaft was repaired and the sawmill 
 was running again, ripping out boards for the homes waiting 
 to be built; and the community had learned that it now had 
 a mechanic who knew how to use tools and should be able 
 to serve them well. 
 
 Right from the first, the Vermonter had all the work he 
 could handle. Farmers who had been wishing for a black- 
 smith but had done without because of the 40'mile trip to 
 the nearest shop, dumped their broken clevises, trace- 
 chains, etc., on his floor for prompt repair. He built a 
 
 29
 
 little shop in Grand Detour, and near it a small snug frame 
 house, 18 X 24, divided into five rooms, with a fireplace in 
 the living room, a steep stairs, two upstairs bedrooms. The 
 house, restored, still stands. It reminds a visitor strongly 
 of a white cottage in some New England town. To 
 John Deere's wife, who made the long journey to join her 
 husband in 1838, it must have seemed co2;y, comfortable, 
 homelike, even on this far, strange frontier. There is a 
 tradition concerning her arrival. She did not come by 
 canal, as he did, but in a mover's wagon from Hancock, 
 Vermont, to Buffalo, New York, thence by lake steamer to 
 Detroit, and thence overland by wagon again; and most of 
 their household goods and her brother'in'law, William 
 Peek, came too, also the three daughters and two sons of 
 John Deere. It was a terrific, six'weeks' journey. Step' 
 ping down at last from the wagon that brought her, she 
 handed her husband a bundle that squirmed. 
 
 "Here, John," she said, ''''you hold him a while. Fve 
 carried him all the way from Vermont!" 
 
 It was their year^old son, Charles, whom John had never 
 seen. The baby was to grow up and play an important 
 part alongside his father . . . 
 
 Very soon plows began to absorb more and more of 
 John Deere's attention, for the reason that the plow was 
 the all'important implement of settlers; and the plows they 
 had were giving trouble. In the winning of this continent 
 from Atlantic to Pacific, the man with a rifle came first. He 
 walked softly; the thunder of his gun soon faded; he left 
 few traces of his passing. Next came the man with an axe 
 and a plow. The land changed under his hand. It was 
 only when these forerunners had gone ahead and prepared 
 the way, that the pioneers with steel rails, the merchants, 
 
 30 
 
 frprm^mmmt^mBOBamm
 
 manufacturers, and all others who constitute modern civili- 
 2;ation, began to pour into the wilderness and fill it up. 
 
 At first, the axe was all'important. The eastern part of 
 the country, as far west as Ohio and Indiana, was densely 
 wooded, and the trees had to be cleared or killed, before 
 the plow could do its part. The prairies, however, were 
 difi^erent. They were not forested, except in scattered 
 groves and along the rivers. Even the groves, when the 
 first settlers arrived, were clear of underbrush, kept so by 
 annual spring fires. The eye traveled straight ahead with 
 little obstruction through marching rows of tree trunks. 
 There was ample timber, however, for building, for fences, 
 and for firewood. An early writer says, of the country 
 in the immediate vicinity of Grand Detour, that in addition 
 to the river timber," . . . which extends from one end of the 
 county to the other, on either side of the river there are 
 21 groves, containing from onc'half to six sections, or from 
 350 to 3,840 acres of timber each; and so distributed over 
 the whole as to accommodate every township in the 
 county ..." 
 
 An ideal arrangement, a delightful'seeming land to 
 settlers who had known the hardship of clearing every acre 
 and pulling hundreds of stumps in order to have a few 
 acres free for the plow. Here a plow could travel almost 
 as far as the eye could see, over a gently-billowing landscape, 
 and never turn out for a stump or strike a buried tree root. 
 
 But in every ointment there must be a fly. The prairie 
 farmers' ointment had a big one! . . . 
 
 Plows, like most other agricultural implements shortly 
 before that time, were but little better than their medieval 
 predecessors. Much of the early plowing in the United 
 States was done with implements that were hardly more 
 
 31 
 
 ;*A;i^'!*!^iW^V"yAJ«i»"4JJ^
 
 than pointed sticks, or tree roots trimmed to shape and 
 pointed with crudely 'hammered iron shares. But at about 
 , the beginning of the nineteenth century, invention turned 
 
 to the improvement of the plov^. Considerable advances 
 were achieved. The record shows that the first cast'iron 
 plow in America was produced by one Charles Newbold, 
 about the year 1796. He is said to have spent a fortune 
 developing his plow, and to no personal advantage; for 
 farmers conceived the strange notion that cast'iron poisoned 
 the soil, impaired fertility, encouraged weeds. 
 
 This notion gradually wore itself out, and other inventors 
 took up where Newbold left off. Versatile Thomas Jef' 
 ferson interested himself in working out what he considered 
 ;;. the proper design for a moldboard; however, he never in' 
 
 V_^^ corporated his ideas in an actual plow. Daniel Webster, 
 
 momentarily forsaking oratory, tried his senatorial hand at 
 the design and actual construction of an improved plow. 
 Notable practical designers were Jethro Wood and David 
 Peacock. "Clute" and "Wiard" were other familiar 
 names on early plows that served their purpose more or 
 less well in the East and found their way to the West, 
 usually securely tied to the side of the covered wagon. 
 Wood's plow, in particular, marked a great advance, be 
 cause of the assembly principle; he made the iron portions in 
 three parts instead of one — share, moldboard, landside — 
 so that if a part were broken, it could be replaced without 
 buying a new plow. 
 
 Now for the fly in the western settler's ointment. 
 Prairie soils were different from those of the East. The 
 latter, as a rule, were loose and somewhat pebbly. The 
 earth fell away from the cast'iron share and moldboard, 
 causing little trouble. The prairies, however, were com' 
 posed of a sticky muck. Instead of falling away, the earth 
 
 32 
 
 MAMA' ■«■!!.
 
 stuck, great gobs of it, like balled snow on a man's boot' 
 heel, till the plow could no longer move in the furrow. 
 John Deere paused often with hammer poised over hot 
 iron, to hear talk between farmers like this: 
 
 "These prairies are fine and dandy to look at with the 
 eye. But they're no good to a farmer if he has to plow as 
 I did today." 
 
 "How was that?" 
 
 "Two teams of oxen, and a paddle. The beasts pulled 
 till they could pull no more. Then Yd yank the plow out 
 of the furrow and clean it with the paddle. That soil, I 
 tell you, sticks like brother Jonathan's gluepot. I spent 
 a whack more of my time cleaning, I reckon, than I ever 
 did plowing." 
 
 "I believe you. These prairies will never be farmed till 
 we have a plow that scours." 
 
 "And that, to my thinking, will be never — " 
 
 And as the poised hammer finally fell on hot iron, it 
 must have been singing a strange refrain to the blacksmith 
 
 from Vermont : 
 
 A plow that scours — 
 A plow that scours — 
 A plow that scours. 
 
 A practical man, this blacksmith. One who thought 
 in terms of present needs and materials, but of a product a 
 step in advance. Could this thing that all the farmers 
 wanted, be made? Could a mechanic who knew his trade 
 thoroughly, build a plow that would scour? If so, how? 
 Not a paper 'and'drawing'board plow, but one built in a 
 frontier shop, for frontiersmen to use behind sweating 
 oxen, of materials such as might be found in a frontier 
 community? . . . 
 
 It was a challenge. 
 
 33 
 
 I <iTifriryriYi'iiY|-|i^YiifiCiri'iW<^4'iT71iMXyrT"7iVY>'rnrif
 
 THE BROKEN SAWMILL BLADE 
 
 MPORTANT events do not necessarily reveal their 
 full importance at the time. Significance grows in retrospect. 
 John Deere, on a brief visit to the sawmill which Leonard 
 Andrus and others were operating at Grand Detour, spied 
 a large circular saw blade of excellent Sheffield steel which 
 had been broken and laid aside as of no further use. Nothing 
 remarkable about that. But looking back, it must be 
 reckoned a momentous event. For, instantly, into the 
 blacksmith's mind flashed the thought that here was the 
 material from which might be fashioned a plow that would 
 scour. Steel! He noticed how the metal shone where 
 it had been polished by friction with wood. Could soil, 
 even sticky, black, prairie muck, cling to such shiny stuff? 
 The mechanic's mind quickly visioned a plowshare and 
 gently curving moldboard, made in one piece from the 
 saw, from which, he imagined, the earth would fall away 
 
 34
 
 crisply as it was cut. He was no dreamer. He was not 
 thinking of the far future, nor of a world'girdling business 
 that might be founded, but of the farmers from a do2,en 
 miles around, who related their troubles in his shop. He 
 brought the broken saw to his shop, and proceeded to fashion 
 the plow he had seen in his mind. 
 
 In later life, so far as known, John Deere never wrote 
 any formal account of this first plow. He was not the 
 writing sort of man. He did tell the story more than once^ 
 however, and some of those who heard him, wrote down 
 their recollection of what he said. Details differ. But 
 the following is one of the most authentic of these accounts : 
 
 "I cut the teeth off the mill'saw with a hand'chisel," 
 John Deere said. ""I cut a pattern out of paper for the 
 moldboard and share." (One account says that he bent 
 his first plow to a form which he carved out of wood.) 
 "I laid the pattern on the saw and cut out around it with 
 a hand chisel, with the help of a striker and a sledge. I 
 then laid the piece on the fire of the forge and heated it, 
 a little at a time, shaping it as best I could with the hand , 
 hammer." (According to one story, he used a wooden / 
 mallet to avoid denting the surface of the steel.) ( 
 
 "After making the upright standards out of bar iron," \ 
 the account continues, "I was ready for the wood parts. \ 
 I went out to the timber, dug up a sapling, and used the 
 crooks of the roots for handles. I shaped the beam out of ' 
 a stick of timber" (a fence rail, in one version) "with an 
 axe and a drawing-knife. In this fashion, I succeeded in 
 constructing a very rough plow." 
 
 A plow has been preserved at Moline which, if not 
 the identical first one built by John Deere, was one of the 
 very early ones. It is a century old, now. The wood of 
 the white'oak beam is rot-pitted and worn with' age. Some 
 
 35
 
 of the parts have been roughly patched with wire and 
 bolts. It is better not to look at it at all, unless, with the 
 eye of an active imagination. For time has stolen its first 
 magic. On that bright morning in 1837, when John Deere 
 wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand 
 and said proudly, "She's finished" — it was an implement 
 that caught and held the eye; new, sturdy, but light 
 enough for a strong man to carry on his shoulder, the sun 
 flashing from the polished steel as light from a mirror. 
 
 Farmers roundabout had heard what the blacksmith was 
 up to. For the most part, they were skepticaLbut_wil]ing^ 
 to be showQ. So, some of them, together with a number 
 of villagers, assembled to watch John Deere's promised 
 test of the new plow. Birds sang in the topmost branches 
 of the village oaks that morning; fat gray^squirrels chased 
 one another, chattering, from limb to limb. On the other 
 side of the river, shadows of wind'blown clouds raced across 
 undulating prairie fields fenced with rails. But the little 
 group of interested spectators paid scant attention to these 
 iW' "^ ' familiar things. They climbed into the boat with John Deere 
 and his precious plow, or followed in other boats, and 
 rowed across to the far bank, calling jokes to one another, 
 warning the curly'headed blacksmith not to be too down 
 in the mouth when his plow proved itself no whit better 
 L^\ W' W ^^^^ ^^^ plows brought from ''back East." John was not 
 ^ ' ' "' * given to light talk, but he sent as good chaff as he received; 
 and, single-handed, he carried the plow across his shoulder 
 to the field where Lewis Crandall was waiting with the 
 necessary horse, and where it was said that no plow would 
 |K. ^ever scour. This field was presumably part of the farm 
 
 of 101 17/100 acres which Crandall sold five years later to 
 Moses Hubbard for $126.46. 
 
 36 
 
 ,if^f^^
 
 Hitching up was no long process. In five minutes, all 
 was ready. 
 
 "Want me to take her?" Crandall asked. 
 
 "I will," said John, "you drive." 
 
 Crandall slapped the reins on the horse's back. They 
 were off. John Deere held the handles which he had 
 fashioned from sapling roots and polished smooth. The ficjT 
 plowshare bit deep into black soil. The horse put his ^ .^t^'^A 
 withers into the pull. Soil began to cut and curl from 
 the moldboard in a neat, smooth furrow. The spectators ^li*" 
 trudged behind, mostly silent, watching and wondering. 
 After an eighth of a mile, they all stopped to appraise the J-'' ^ 
 performance. '^ ^ Ci 
 
 "By cracky!" exclaimed one bystander, after a good look 
 at the plow, "She's clean!" 
 
 There were several echoes of this approval — and some 
 shouts of doubt. 
 
 ''''So fur she's clean," said one of the doubters, "but you 
 wait!" 
 
 Crandall turned the horse, and they trudged back across 
 the field, cutting another furrow. It was an ideal field, 
 ideal weather for the test. The earth was still a little too 
 moist; if ever it would stick to a plow, it should stick now. 
 At the end of the second furrow, they stopped for a further 
 examination. Moldboard was surprisingly clean. The 
 gummy soil seemed unable to cling to it. A farmer turned 
 to his neighbor : 
 
 "No need of your paddle with that plow!" he remarked 
 triumphantly. "She moves right along, and polishes her' 
 self as she moves." ' 
 
 The one spoken to had broken many a prairie acre. 
 
 37
 
 ""Aye," he said drily, ''so it seems, but I still don't believe 
 it! . . ." 
 
 Round and round the field they went. Half a do2;en 
 times. A dozen. John Deere relinquished his place at 
 the handles and let others take a turn at holding the plow. 
 The worst pessimists finally had to admit that his plow 
 scoured better than any plow they had ever seen. The 
 optimists, on the other hand, were enthusiastic. John Deere 
 himself was pleased; but not too pleased. 
 
 'Tm making you a present of this plow, Lewis," he 
 said to Crandall, "for loaning the use of your land and the 
 horse. But Yd Hke well to take it back with me to the 
 shop for a few days. I doubt not Fll build another, and 
 I will wish to study this. Maybe ways of improving it 
 will occur to me." 
 
 So ended the test of John Deere's first steel plow. A 
 truly memorable occasion in the history of agricultural 
 implements in America; yes, in the history of America 
 itself . . . 
 
 38
 
 VI 
 
 AN INDUSTRY BEGINS 
 
 HIS man who had come out from Vermont bringing the 
 tools of his trade and an ambition to better himself was 
 more than a skilled mechanic and blacksmithj_more than 
 an inventor. He had, in addition, the business instinct. 
 It was in him, not only to design a better plow, but also 
 to give it to the world; as Henry Ford, a good many years 
 later, was able, not only to conceive and create a low'priced 
 car, but also to win mass distribution for it. In Vermont, 
 instead of waiting for customers to order shovels or hay 
 forks made, John Deere had followed the practice of making 
 them up ahead and having them on hand when customers 
 called. This was more like modern manufacturing and 
 was an advance on the common practice of his time — 
 most blacksmiths were content to make to order only. 
 Indeed, the idea of manufacturing was not unfamiliar to 
 Deere, for in Vermont, the great manufacturer of scales, 
 Mr. Fairbanks, learning of his skill in making forks, had 
 
 39
 
 urged him to move to St. Johnsbury and devote himself 
 entirely to their production. So now, having seen his 
 plow at least a qualified success, he resumed his practice of 
 occupying his spare time by building in advance of demand. 
 
 According to records that have come down, he built 
 only one plow in 1837- In 1838, he built three. During 
 these years, of course, he was carrying on his regular trade 
 of blacksmithing, and also did the entire iron work of a 
 new saw- and flouring-mill. In 1839, however, he was able 
 to build ten plows; and, by 1842, he was building no less 
 than one hundred, or about two per week. He allowed 
 each plow to be its own salesman and demonstrator. The 
 story of how he did this has been told by a man then resi' 
 dent in Grand Detour, John M. Gould, who later, for a 
 time, was John Deere's partner. 
 
 "At the time he succeeded in getting his first plows to 
 scour," Mr. Gould wrote, "the government lands in that 
 part of the country were subject to entry. Previous to 
 that time, nearly all the farms in that vicinity were held 
 under preemption laws, or claims." The land office, he 
 goes on to say, was located at Dixon, half a do2;en miles 
 away, and, at the time of the land sales, large numbers of 
 farmers from far and near passed through Grand Detour 
 on their way to establish legal ownership of the farms on 
 which, heretofore, they had been virtually squatters. At 
 such times, John Deere made it his custom to have one or 
 more plows on exhibit in front of his shop. On top of the 
 beam appeared the legend, "Self'Polisher." Mr. Gould 
 records a remembered conversation, typical of many others. 
 A farmer, driving through, stopped for a look at the plows. 
 Re read the legend. 
 
 "Self-polisher be damned!" he exploded. "There never 
 40
 
 was a plow made that will scour in this prairie soil." 
 
 John Deere heard him, and came out front. "Stranger," 
 he said, "where do you live?" 
 
 The farmer spat over the wagon wheel, "Up Blooming' 
 
 ville way." 
 
 "Will you," Deere said, "take one of these plows home 
 with you, and try it? And if it does not scour, will you 
 let me know? I will send for it, and get it without any 
 cost to you." 
 
 "Aye? And if it does scour?" 
 
 "I ask $10 for it." 
 
 Many of the farmers to whom this proposition was put, 
 Gould says, begged off, saying, "I don't want to be bothered 
 v^rith anything of that kind, Mr. Deere." But now and 
 then a man consented. Through these, his earliest cus" 
 tomers, Deere's reputation gradually grew. Later, when 
 the business was increasing pretty rapidly, he made a prac 
 tice of loading several plows on a wagon and peddling 
 them from farm to farm; or, when that was too arduous, 
 he would leave several with a welMocated farmer, who 
 was asked to sell them and take a commission for his trouble. 
 
 John Deere was not satisfied with these early plows. 
 He was continually testing them in different soils, under 
 different conditions, in various parts of the counties round- 
 about. Says Gould, "Mr. Deere, in his early experience, 
 would make a plow, then go out and give it a trial and, if 
 it did not work, he would take it to pieces and change the 
 shape and try it again." It was perhaps in the shaping of 
 the moldboard that John Deere's ingenuity, skill, and per- 
 severance were evidenced best. Nobody else was so 
 thoroughly convinced as he, nor did anybody else work 
 so hard to prove, that successful scouring depended, not 
 
 41
 
 only on the kind ofme£al_used, but also on the shape. 
 
 This idea he wrestled with till he pinned both shoulders 
 to the mat. Quite often, a wide-eyed small boy rode with 
 him on these early test trips and held the plow for him, 
 or drove. The blacksmith's son, Charles, got his first 
 acquaintance with the business of manufacturing plows 
 when the top of his head was still almost too low to reach 
 above the handles of the plow . . . 
 
 At the outset, John Deere seems to have continued using 
 sawmill saws for the steel parts of his plows. There was 
 practically no other source of steel readily available to him 
 at that time. Indeed, getting even iron was sometimes a 
 good deal of a chore. Once, Gould says, he had to drive 
 a one'horse spring wagon all the way to Springfield for it, 
 that being the nearest place where any was to be had. 
 Steel of the kind and shape he wanted was nearly unob' 
 tainable in this country. Most ^en__WQiikLhave JeM:hat 
 fact beat them. Not John Deere. He entered into a 
 lengthy correspondence with the representatives of an 
 English firm. Nay lor fe? Co., and persuaded them to have 
 cast steel rolled for him in shape for cutting the moldboards. 
 This, the first steel of the kind ever rolled, arrived after 
 many months. It came in short slabs, each slab contain' 
 ing about enough material for half a dozen moldboards. 
 Due to the high initial cost, and the costs of transportation, 
 however, the price of the metal was close to $300 per ton, 
 a little too expensive to be built into plows for the great 
 majority of farmers living on a frontier where cash was 
 always hard to come by. Furthermore, there was con- 
 siderable trouble due to the action of salt sea air on the 
 metal during the crossing. The first shipment, ordered 
 ready-polished, on arrival was found to be badly pitted by 
 rust. John Deere resolved to make an effort to obtain 
 
 42
 
 necessary supplies nearer home, and journeyed to Pitts- 
 burgh for that purpose. It is a matter of record that "the 
 first slab of cast plow steel ever rolled in the United States 
 was rolled by William Woods at the steel works of Jones 
 6? Quiggs in 1846, and shipped to John Deere, under whose 
 direction it was made.*" 
 
 The blacksmith encountered the usual money difficulties 
 in getting his infant business on its feet. Growth came 
 faster than he could finance it, alone. He had to install 
 horse power, presumably on the treadmill order, and later 
 steam power. Therefore, he soon took in a partner, none 
 other than Major Andrus, the founder and foremost 
 citizen of Grand Detour. The articles of their partnership 
 '"'aggreement'"' have been preserved, written in a handsome 
 hand on foolscap. They provided, in part: 
 
 "that the said Deere and Andrus have aggreed and by 
 these presents do aggree to become copartners together in 
 the art and trade of blacksmithing, plough'making and all 
 things thereto belonging at the said Grand Detour, and all 
 other business that the said parties may hereafter deem 
 necessary for their mutual interest and benefit . . . 
 
 "The said Deere on his part further aggrees that he will 
 furnish the shop and out'buildings belonging thereto lately 
 occupied by none than said Deere as a Blacksmith shop ..." 
 
 "The said Deere" also agreed "to employ his whole 
 time in the business of the copartnership," as did "the 
 said Andrus," and each agreed at all times to "faithfully 
 exercise his best skill and ability to promote the interest 
 of the copartnership." Andrus furnished cash capital; 
 Deere furnished "what stock he has now on hand and 
 other materials at a fair valuation and also a sufficient 
 amount of cash capital to make up the same amount . . . 
 as furnished by the said Andrus." March 20, 1843, was 
 the date of this document. 
 
 ♦James Moore Swank, "History of the Manufacture of Iron in All Ages," The American Iron fir' Steel 
 Ass'n, Phila., 1892. 
 
 4J
 
 i^ 
 
 The agreement was twice rewritten at later dates to 
 admit other partners, first, a certain Horace H. Paine, and 
 again, one Oramel C. Lathrop. It was finally terminated 
 in 1847. During its lifetime, the business had considerable 
 growth. A plow factory of brick was built. It became 
 a familiar sight to see Deere, Andrus, or one of their helpers 
 marching from blacksmith shop to plow factory, or back 
 again, with castings or finished plows over their shoulders. 
 The partners also constructed the first foundry seen in 
 that part of the country, using horses to drive the cupola 
 fan; and because they did not have horses enough of their 
 own, they borrowed from their neighbors. Once a week, 
 they heated the metal in the cupola, and "poured." It 
 was a sight that the majority of people in that part of the 
 country had never seen; they used to come for miles out 
 of curiosity to watch the process. 
 
 In 1846, the last full year of the Andrus and Deere part' 
 ^ nership, about a thousand plows were manufactured. For 
 
 A"^^ a business of such si^e and prospects, John Deere decided 
 that Grand Detour was not the best possible location. 
 It was too remote, he felt, from supplies and trans' 
 portation. Coal had to be hauled overland, by wagon, 
 from the mines near LaSalle, a distance of some 40 miles, 
 over roads often hub'deep in mud. All plows sold, unless 
 called for by customers, had to be delivered by wagon. 
 Navigation of the Rock River by steamboat, once thought 
 to hold promise, had not proved a success. One steamer, 
 the GipsQ,-^^ did ambitiously make a trip upstream as far 
 as Grand Detour in April, 1838, but the trip could be made 
 safely only during short periods of high water. Another 
 steamboat, the Lighter, went even further upstream in 
 1844, but two or three trips ended the effort. Railroads 
 were still in the sharc'selling^and'hope stage, so far as 
 
 44
 
 that part of the state was concerned, and the whistle of 
 the locomotive was not to disturb the ancient peace of 
 these prairies for several years to come. 
 
 All such considerations, and possibly others, induced 
 John Deere to reach the important conclusion that he 
 should locate elsewhere. He foresaw the growth of man' 
 ufacturing. Oats and corn, at 8 and 10 cents a bushel, 
 and wheat at 49 and 50 cents a bushel, were being shipped 
 to the New England states to feed a rapidly increasing 
 manufacturing population, and John Deere and others 
 wondered why the West should not have its own indus- 
 trial growth. Accompanied by his foreman, Robert N. 
 Tate, he drove about looking at various possible sites, and, 
 on one of these excursions, came to Moline on the Miss- 
 issippi, of which he had already heard favorable reports. 
 At that time, Moline was "a very nice village" with a 
 dam and water power, and a handful of mills of various 
 kinds. Deere decided it was the place for him. So, in 
 1847, the partnership was terminated. An agreement was 
 reached as to the territory in which each man was to have 
 exclusive selling rights, for Major Andrus was determined 
 to continue the manufacture of plows at Grand Detour. 
 John Deere, for his part, now a full-fledged manufacturer 
 rather than a mere blacksmith, once more set his face to- 
 ward the sunset. His removal this time, however, in- 
 volved a journey of only about seventy miles. 
 
 At the time he took this step, John Deere was 43 years 
 old. It is said that he was worth about $8,000. This 
 may well have been true, for an examination of property 
 transfers in Grand Detour during the four years, 1847 to 
 1851, when he was winding up his affairs there, shows that 
 he and his wife disposed of various parcels of real estate 
 for a total consideration of $4,200. Not great wealth, to 
 
 45
 
 be sure, yet, considering the fact that he arrived in this 
 little village with a total cash capital of $73.73, his stay 
 had not been entirely in vain. 
 
 Aside from material considerations, John Deere had 
 definitely established himself as a successful designer and 
 builder of plows of a type better suited to the work re 
 quired of them than any theretofore produced. Most 
 important of all, he knew what he wanted, and had learned 
 how to carry on beyond the point at which he had arrived; 
 they say that if a man has learned that by the age of forty, 
 he has done well indeed. 
 
 Judged by later accomplishments, John Deere had barely 
 made a start. It was his destiny to give to the world the '-AAi /V' 
 steel plow, and to join that small company of men whose ' 
 names are enrolled in history for basic contributions to the 
 world's progress. When he left Grand Detour in 1847, 
 the whole world and both hemispheres lay before him, a" 
 nut waiting to be cracked, and he with the hammer to 
 crack it! . . . 
 
 46
 
 VII 
 
 AN INDUSTRY GROWS 
 
 T is not the purpose of the present account to go into 
 exhaustive and perhaps tedious details concerning the later 
 growth of the business which John Deere founded. Only 
 a few of the high spots will be touched. 
 
 In those first years in Moline, difficulties were numerous, 
 partly because of scarcity ^f_funds, partly because of 
 haziards inherent in establishing any new enterprise, and 
 to a very considerable extent because of the lack of modern 
 methods of travel, transport, communication, banking, 
 credit, advertising, salesmanship. Travelers to and from 
 Moline were served by Frink 6? Walker's line of four-horse 
 stagecoaches, of the type described by the English traveler, 
 Ruxton, who crossed the Illinois prairies in one of them in 
 the year 1847- "It is a huge lumbering affair with leathern 
 springs," Ruxton wrote, ''and it creaks and groans over 
 the corduroy roads and unmacadamized causeways, thump- 
 
 47
 
 ing, bumping, and dislocating the limbs of its 'insides\ 
 whose smothered shrieks and exclamations of despair often 
 cause the woodsman to pause from his work, and, leaning 
 upon his axe, listen with astonishment to the din which 
 proceeds from its convulsed interior." 
 
 The daily stagecoach arrived in Moline each night just 
 a little before dark, if the roads were in average condition, 
 and left early in the morning. It took from 36 to 48 hours 
 to go to Chicago, and longer to St. Louis. The river was 
 the natural route to St. Louis, but when navigation was 
 closed, the stagecoach was the only public conveyance; 
 a traveler bound thither from Moline, must first go 
 north to Albany, then east to Dixon, then south through 
 Bloomington and the central part of the state. 
 
 "To go to St. Louis in the winter," Mr. Deere once 
 remarked grimly, "we had to go by the way of Michilli' 
 mackinac!" 
 
 When the river was frozen and heavy articles were 
 needed from a distance, they had to be freighted in by 
 wagon. If they were brought from Chicago, it took about 
 two weeks; if from Galena, only about half as long. 
 
 It was considerably easier, however, to distribute plows 
 from Moline than from Grand Detour. A much larger 
 territory could^ be reached. The plows were loaded on 
 river steamers for such points as Galena, Dubuque, Burling' 
 ton, Muscatine, and Keokuk, and from there, they were 
 sent out to surrounding towns and farms by wagon. 
 
 As for banks, there were none nearer than Galena or 
 Burlington. Even the money in use was mostly foreign, 
 Mexican, French, or English — hard money, for the most 
 part, but also Vv^ith a scattering of dubious bank notes from 
 Missouri, Ohio, Indiana. If exchange on St. Louis or 
 
 48
 
 New York were wanted in winter, it could sometimes be 
 bought by crossing the river and making arrangements 
 with a certain law and land firm in Davenport; but some' 
 times, after ferrying across the river, it was found that 
 even this could not be arranged, and the money bag had 
 to be brought back. (Telephones, of course, were still 
 unknown.) In summer, clerks on the steamboats could 
 be trusted to handle such matters. When immediate cash 
 was needed, perhaps to stave off an insistent creditor, 
 there was no such thing as negotiating a routine loan. 
 Money, if obtained at all, had to be hunted to its hiding 
 places. One day John Deere badly needed $200. He 
 asked a merchant in Rock Island if the latter knew of any 
 place where such a sum might be obtained. 
 
 ''Do you know that Swede tailor in Moline?" the mer^ 
 chant asked. "Jo^^^son, his name is." 
 
 "Yes. Has he got $200?" 
 
 "No; but he has a friend just arrived from Sweden. 
 I borrowed $2,000 from the friend. I think he has some 
 more ..." 
 
 John Deere rushed back to the factory and burst in on 
 John Gould, who was then one of his partners, and in 
 charge of the financial end. "Tailor Johnson," he said, 
 "has an acquaintance who has some money. Hunt him 
 up as quick as you can and see what you can do." 
 
 Gould hunted, and found him. Then an interpreter 
 had to be found. But the loan was negotiated; $200 in 
 gold, for a year, at 10 per cent interest! 
 
 Mails were slow, the postal service casual. Postage 
 stamps, remember, were just coming into use in the United 
 States the year John Deere moved to Moline. The post' 
 
 49
 
 master was a certain Dr. Wells. He kept the office open 
 to suit his convenience, sometimes for three or four hours 
 a day. The plow factory rented one of the largest boxes, 
 so located that a person could see through the front win' 
 dow whether there was anything in it; and if there were, 
 and it was wanted in a hurry, a hunt for the doctor was 
 indicated. He was likely to be found parked somewhere 
 on a store counter, hands wound round one knee, telling 
 stories. 
 
 "Mail?" he would say to the inquirer, "all right — " im' 
 patiently " — Fll go down and open up — presently. Now, 
 as I was saying ..." 
 
 If it was hard to find money to pay creditors, it was 
 doubly hard to collect from debtors. Fairly aggressive 
 selling methods, for that time, were used. John Gould, 
 for instance, was sent to Iowa City in January, 1849. 
 The legislature was in session there. He interviewed all 
 the members, and from them secured the names of business 
 men in various parts of the state who might serve as agents. 
 Correspondence followed. Many of these men were 
 signed up. Plows were then placed with them on con' 
 signment, and the agents, in turn, sold the farmers, usually 
 on time. When asked to pay for plows sold, they were 
 pretty likely to refuse. 
 
 "We can't afford to advance the money," was their 
 excuse. "We have sold the plows and taken the farmers' 
 notes. You can have the notes if you want them. But 
 we can't cash them. You must just wait till we collect." 
 
 John Deere, in the early days, found only one exception 
 to this universal debtor delay. He had an agent in Des 
 Moines who, when asked to settle, counted the number 
 of plows sold and handed over the cash at once. It was a 
 
 50 y^
 
 real pleasure to do business with that one! 
 
 For some ten years after going to Moline, the black' 
 smith'inanufacturer continued to work at the anvil himself, 
 not continuously of course, but persistently. He loved 
 the feel of the heavy haimner in his hand, loved the smell 
 and smoke of the forge fire, loved the sound of iron on iron, 
 and the sight of flying sparks. The number of employees 
 steadily increased, but regular pay days were something 
 of which they had no knowledge. They bartered their 
 labor, not for cash, but for the right to obtain goods. 
 John Deere used to place plows for sale with merchants in 
 the vicinity and give his workmen orders on these mer' 
 chants for what they needed. At intervals, there was a 
 reckoning'up between manufacturer and merchants. The 
 company also maintained a boarding-house in which many 
 of the men were boarded at a cost of from $1.50 to $1.75 
 per week. Good blacksmiths could be hired then to work 
 ten hours a day, at wages of $20 to $30 per month, includ- 
 ing board, but if an unusually skilled blacksmith were 
 needed for fine machine work, his rate would be $1.75 per 
 day and he boarded himself. Carpenters were hired at 
 $1.50 for a 10-hour day. It was only when an employee 
 left or was discharged, that a settlement took place, and 
 then cash had to be raised somehow for the purpose. 
 
 The business grew, its scope expanded. In an ad- 
 vertisement appearing in a Moline paper on April 1, 1852, 
 "the subscriber" (John Deere) declared that he was "pre- 
 pared to furnish plows to all who may see fit to favor him 
 with their orders — on reasonable notice, and at rates to 
 suit the times." In the same announcement, he declared 
 that "with the facilities for manufacturing which are had 
 at this place, I can increase from 4,000 (the number now 
 
 51
 
 J 
 
 manufactured) to 10,000, yearly, if necessary." And he 
 added: "Always on hand and for sale, wholesale or re^ 
 tail, every variety of one and two horse Plows; all si^es of 
 Breakers. Also a superior article of Seed Drill." 
 
 The railroad came through in 1854, and, in 1856, a bridge 
 was completed that opened up rail traffic across the Miss' 
 issippi. It did not bring at once, nor for a long time, the 
 high-speed service of 1937, but it did simplify both passen' 
 ger travel and freight transport, and greatly improved the 
 mail service. The telegraph came at the same time. Dis- 
 tant parts of the country were drawing in closer, one to 
 another. Far j)laces were only hours apart now, whereas, 
 before they had been'separated by days or weeks. The 
 tempo began to be more like that of our day. 
 
 Charles Deere was rapidly growing up, and came into 
 the business in 1853. This was important. The son de- 
 veloped skill in financial matters, sagacity in organi^tion 
 and merchanSsSg^and other management qualities which 
 supplemented his father's skill as a mechanic and manu- 
 facturer. The older man, for instance, had been content 
 to keep books by a rudimentary system amounting to little 
 more than a diary. A sale was written out ("sold such- 
 and-such to so-and-so") often in such sketchy form that it 
 was unintelligible to anyone else. Purchases likewise. 
 The son, however, had been to Knox College at Galesburg 
 for a while, and at BelPs Business College in Chicago, and 
 was able to systematize all this. Under his hand, his 
 father's plow company, which had always been organi2;ed 
 as a^ partnership or an individual enterprise, gathered speed 
 and cohesion and came, in time, to take on the smooth- 
 running characteristics of a modern, successful corpora- 
 tion . . . 
 
 52
 
 Years slipped past, like flood waters in the Mississippi. 
 The further West was filling up rapidly now, just as Illinois 
 had been filling up when John Deere first adventured into 
 it. As early as 1846, the historian, Francis Parkman, pass' 
 ing through St. Louis "on a tour of curiosity and amuse- 
 ment to the Rocky Mountains," had remarked on the 
 breathless rush. Emigrants from every part of the country 
 preparing for the journey to Oregon and California. Traders 
 in great numbers bound for Santa Fe. Hotels crowded. 
 Gunsmiths and saddlers kept at work till all hours. Steam- 
 boats leaving the levee nearly every day, bound up the 
 Missouri with crowds of passengers, a majority of them 
 farmers, going to seek out the far frontiers. And where 
 farmers went, of course, John Deere plows went too. A 
 farmer was pleased to have a plow made in Moline. The 
 reputation of the skilled frontier blacksmith was penetrat- 
 ing to the remotest parts of the country, and even beyond 
 the seas. And in Moline itself, as a sign that the first 
 rough pioneering stages of the business were past, the 
 headquarters of the company gradually came to assume a 
 certain appropriate dignity and elegance. A writer with 
 an astonished pen, visiting the plant in 1869, described 
 some of the many wonders he saw. The office, particu- 
 larly, aroused lyric raptures: 
 
 "... occupying a space of 30 x 45 feet, including an 
 eight'foot hall which separates it from the storage depart' 
 ment, and contains an elegant stairway leading to the second 
 story . . . Divided into two apartments by a frosted glass 
 partition. Ample light is admitted through double recess 
 windows of the best French glass, and elegant chandelier 
 gas burners depend from the ceiling for use at night. The 
 desks were expressly designed and constructed for this 
 office, and, together with all the woodwork and furniture, 
 are of solid walnut. The bookkeeper's room is handsomely 
 carpeted ... A beautiful mantel of marbleized iron with 
 grate underneath, though the entire office is heated by 
 
 53
 
 warm air conducted from the boiler room in pipes . . . The 
 ceilings are beautifully frescoed, and the door knobs and 
 locks are of well plated silver ... A large clock on the 
 wall regulates the hours of labor . . . The most convenient 
 and elaborate business office we have ever seen . . . not 
 surpassed, if equaled, in the West." 
 
 Very different, this, from the village forge. But 
 John Deere, past three'score now, his hair turning iron 
 gray, moved easily in it and was a vigorous and command- 
 ing part of it all. As of old, his interest lay chiefly in the 
 product, in its improvement, in the design of new imple- 
 ments to fill new needs and to keep abreast of demand. 
 "Almost every year, in our long experience," his catalog 
 of 1868 boasted, "we have discovered and applied some 
 new feature to our Plows, enhancing their value." So it 
 had been in the beginning. So he was determined it should 
 continue. Once, a thousand plows a year had seemed 
 to him a remarkable output; now more than that number 
 were produced in a week. He stood no more in a leather 
 apron at the anvil. If the winters were too harsh, he rode 
 on the cars to California and enjoyed the sunshine. But 
 that was banishment. Always, he was impatient to re- 
 turn, to be where he could observe the structure that he 
 had started and watch it win new growth daily. 
 
 Wealth came to him as it grew. Naturally. He was 
 pleased with that. He built a substantial big house on 
 the brow of the bluff, whence he could look out over city, 
 river, the smoke of his increasing plants. When com- 
 mittees came to him with a tale of church or chapel to be 
 built, or asking a new market place for the city, or a sub- 
 scription for some other worthy purpose, he was glad to 
 be the first to give. Not a little of his money went to 
 establish Sunday Schools, particularly in Kansas, Ne- 
 braska, Dakota, and other newer communities. His prop- 
 
 54
 
 erty holdings increased outside of his own business, as 
 was also natural. Several farms came into his possession- 
 Substantial business blocks and several residential proper^ 
 ties in Moline were recorded under his name. He was an 
 important stockholder in the First National Bank, and in 
 the Moline 6? Rock Island horse railway. His wealth was 
 whisperingly guessed at half a million. Once, long since, 
 the sunset had beckoned him with golden promises, and 
 the promises had been kept. And yet ... his enduring 
 interest, the thought that he kept ahead of all others, the 
 purpose that ever commanded his instant attention and 
 meant more to him than the piling'up of personal profit, 
 was the construction of new and better tools to aid in the 
 job of American agriculture. 
 
 He started with a plow. One plow of steel. A 
 \ greatly improved plow in its day. A rather simple implc 
 Jment in retrospect. He lived to finger through catalogs 
 / of his firm that listed implements, the very names of which 
 \ would have mystified first farmers of Illinois: listing plow, 
 ■ subsoil plow, root-ground plow, "bluebeard steel plow," 
 "New Deal gang," "Gopher cultivator," scarifier, Gilpin 
 sulky . . . and, in addition, harrows of many types, potato 
 digger, much more. If he cared, in a moment of reflection, 
 to take credit, he could remember that he was responsible 
 for making Moline the plow capital of the world — that 
 his plows were shipped to every country on the face of 
 the earth — that they were seen on the pampas of the 
 Argentine, among bushmen of Australia, Hottentots of 
 South Africa, moujiks of Russia. The old habit of big 
 talk did not entirely disappear as the West began to come 
 of age, and Mark Twain, passenger on a Mississippi steam- 
 boat, once heard with a twinkle and recorded with gusto 
 
 55
 
 the remark of a stranger (perhaps one of John Deere's 
 agents) : 
 
 "You show me any country under the sun where they 
 really know how to plow, and if I don't show you our mark 
 on the plow they use, Til eat that plow, and I won't ask 
 for any Woostershyre sauce to flavor it up with, either.**" 
 
 The part that any individual plays in the events of his 
 time, can never be more than roughly appraised. A man 
 makes what contribution he can, great or small, depending 
 on his nature and opportunity. Events follow. Would 
 they have followed without him? Who can say? Not long 
 ago, the writer of this brief account of the life of John Deere, 
 had occasion to sit in the living room of Math Schumacher's 
 modern farm home in the North Platte Valley, in far 
 western Nebraska. Math was one of the first settlers 
 in that part of the country. He built his ''soddy" there 
 in the year 1885, and it was the only human habitation 
 as far as the sharpest eye could see, in a lonely country 
 of matted buffalo grass and insufficient rain. Math 
 brought out an old photograph of that "soddy," showing 
 a long, low, two'windowed shack, with a round stovepipe 
 sticking through the dirt roof, and with Math and his dog 
 at the side, and eight or ten fat hens flocking about. Also, 
 the picture showed the farming tools that Math, pioneer 
 sod'buster, owned at that time. They were an axe for 
 chewing hunks of firewood out of the tough cedar logs 
 brought from the Wildcat Hills across the river, and a 
 plow. It was a full twenty years after Math came before 
 a railroad finally found its way into what is now one of 
 the very rich, irrigated, sugar-beet-growing, cattle- and 
 lamb-feeding areas of the country. As often happened 
 on many lonely frontiers, it was a plow that broke the way 
 to eventual wealth. 
 
 * Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi," page 431. 
 
 56
 
 VIII 
 
 AN ITEM OF MAY 18, 1886 
 
 N its issue of May 18, 1886, the Moline Daily Repub- 
 lican carried, on its front page, an item stating that John Deere 
 "died at his home in this city at 8:00 last evening" — and 
 it went on to give details of his life, work, death. The 
 Vermont blacksmith, an old oak, had finally blown over. 
 The pioneer had trekked to his last home. Toward the 
 sunset still. 
 
 The city of Moline honored itself by honoring the man 
 who had long been its foremost citizien. For the day of 
 the funeral. Mayor Schillinger recommended that '"'the 
 people of this city suspend their usual business or employ- 
 ment." The City Council resolved: ""'We look with 
 pride upon a grand and noble character, so successful in 
 life, so complete in death . . ." The funeral was held 
 at 10:00 a. m. on Thursday, the 20th, at the Congregational 
 
 57
 
 Church. Flowers were banked deep around the plain 
 casket. In middle life, his feet had trod often among 
 purple liatris, physostegia, and the wild crimson phlox of 
 the prairies. But on his casket, lay a bunch of calla lilies, 
 crossed with a sheaf of ripened grain. Nearby, stood a 
 floral plow with the inscription ""John Deere" on the 
 beam. The Reverend C. L. Morgan conducted the serv' 
 ices, putting into words what all present knew: 
 
 "Nothing left his shop but spoke the truth, was just as 
 represented . . . He was not a theori^er, or one who dealt 
 in impracticable things, but in solid facts." 
 
 The service closed with the hymn, There Is a Land of 
 Pure Delight. 
 
 John Deere, in life, had built his home on the brow of 
 the bluff. In death, he was laid away on the brow of the 
 bluff — in Riverside Cemetery, as they call it. He loved 
 wide landscapes. And the place of his burial is where 
 one may look out over the town, the smoke of factories, 
 the great river. Where one may see many sunsets . . . 
 
 58
 
 IX "THERE IS THE MAN HIMSELF" 
 
 Some men, dying, leave behind a flashing trail of re- 
 membered incidents that photograph character, focus 
 personality. Not so John Deere. Revealing stories after 
 half a century are curiously few. The story of his life was 
 written chiefly in his works. His fountain pen was a 
 hammer. His paper was sheet steel. But the man, living, 
 was a memorable figure. Despite the fact that his true 
 biography was a plow, he himself does not altogether 
 escape us. 
 
 Physically, he was a lion. Not unusually tall. Only 
 about six feet. But he was broad of shoulder, powerful, 
 tireless. Said one who knew him well: ''"He had the 
 muscles of a giant, brains enough to successfully command 
 an army, and a heart that never shrank within him." His 
 features, especially in later life, were carved in the granite 
 of decision. 
 
 An outstanding characteristic from that day as a boy 
 when he ground bark for a tanner, to the day of his death, 
 was his industriousness. Seldom was he idle for a minute. 
 John Gould clerked and slept in Dana & Throop's store, 
 almost across from John Deere's blacksmith shop in Grand 
 Detour. "I," wrote Gould, "have heard his hammering 
 in the morning, when I was in the store in bed, at four 
 o'clock, and at ten o'clock at night; he had such indomitable 
 determination to do and work out what he had in his 
 mind." 
 
 His reasoned rule of life was simple, terse enough to 
 
 59
 
 have been carved for an epitaph on his tombstone. Not 
 long before his death, he expressed it in this wise to a 
 friend: 
 
 "It is a source of consolation to me to know that I never 
 willfully wronged any man and that I never put on the 
 market a poorlymade implement." 
 
 His manner, especially in the later years of his life, was 
 dignified. So dignified that some people, knowing him 
 only as they saw him on the streets, imagined him to be 
 cold, stern, austere. He was very far from that. His 
 dignity was only the protective shell around a warm heart. 
 A thin shell, easily broken. To anyone who had any 
 claim on his loyalty, he was completely loyal. To anyone 
 who had a claim on his charity, he was more than charita- 
 ble. He was not one to obtrude offers of help officiously. 
 Of an independent disposition himself, he honored inde- 
 pendence in others. The story is told of a workman who, 
 when he first came into John Deere's employ, rented a 
 house belonging to John Deere. Later, he bought a house 
 elsewhere on a very small down-payment. It was a heavy 
 load for him to carry. Mr. Deere realizied how heavy; and 
 he was deeply interested. Often in passing through the 
 shop, he would stop for a chat with the man; and almost 
 always before leaving he would say: 
 
 "Have you got that house paid for yet, Dick?" 
 
 And once, as if he could no longer restrain himself, he 
 leaned over and whispered: "Dick, if you do need any 
 help on that house, don't fail to let me know." 
 
 Incidents are revealing. But a man, after all, is known 
 best by his works. John Deere lived at that critical hour 
 when agriculture was just beginning to turn from hand- 
 power, and from animal-power of limited efficiency, to 
 
 60
 
 machine methods. Old'fashioned makeshift plows, to be 
 sure, did continue in use for many years after his steel plow 
 had proved its worth, just as old'fashioned cradles con' 
 tinued to be used in the grain harvest for many years after 
 the invention of the reaper. Other ancient methods sur' 
 vived, just as some of them do to this very day. But the 
 main tide had turned. Soon, everywhere, there were to be 
 shiny harvesters and threshers, whirring mowing machines, 
 great combines, corn pickers, tractors, ensilage harvesters, 
 disk harrows, plows and tillers, rotary hoes, stalk cutters 
 . . . single machines doing the work of twenty men . . . 
 releasing labor from the drudgery and slave aspect of farm' 
 ing . . . leaving great numbers free to engage in producing 
 articles of manufacture and commerce . . . extending the 
 limit of commodities available for human consumption . . . 
 increasing leisure . . . bringing to pass, in short, an agricul' 
 tural revolution in which the last word has not yet been 
 written. We can see what it means when we are told that, 
 without modern machinery, the production of the 1933 
 wheat crop alone would have required every man, vvoman, 
 and child in the United States, and millions more besides. 
 
 Much of all this came after John Deere's time. In the 
 beginning of it, in the setting of the sails for the long voyage 
 — he was a mighty figure. 
 
 No farming implement is more essential than the plow. 
 It was the plow in modern form that his genius gave to the 
 world. 
 
 That achievement must be reckoned one of the major 
 accomplishments in the agricultural revolution. 
 
 For any man, that is enough . . . 
 
 61