John Deere's Plow and the Transformation of the Prairie

In the summer of eighteen thirty-seven, a thirty-three-year-old Vermont-born blacksmith named John Deere stood in the machine shop of a sawmill in Grand Detour, Illinois, and looked at a broken steel sawmill blade. He was thinking about something else entirely: the prairie sod.

Deere had watched his neighbors struggle. The cast-iron plow they had brought from the East did not shed the heavy, sticky Illinois gumbo soil. It clogged after every few feet and had to be scraped clean by hand, over and over. A farmer could barely move across a field. Deere shaped the discarded saw blade into a curved plow share and polished it to a high sheen. The idea was that the glossy, tightly curved steel surface would scour itself clean as it cut through the sod. He tested it on a neighbor's farm. It worked. The prairie soil fell away from the blade in smooth curls.

By eighteen forty-eight, demand was so large that Deere moved his operation to Moline on the Mississippi River, closer to raw materials and water transport. By eighteen fifty-seven, he was manufacturing ten thousand plows a year. The company he founded still operates from Moline today.

What Deere's plow made possible was nothing less than the transformation of the American interior. The deep black soil of Illinois, some of the most productive farmland on earth, could now be broken and cultivated at scale. Illinois became the nation's leading corn producer. By the Civil War, it was feeding the Union Army. The prairie that had defeated every cast-iron implement finally yielded to a piece of polished steel shaped by a blacksmith who noticed a discarded blade on a workshop floor.