John Deere's Steel Plow: Eighteen Miles Down the Rock River

Eighteen miles south of Rockford, where the Rock River bends through a limestone valley, a thirty-two-year-old blacksmith from Vermont arrived in eighteen thirty-six with almost nothing. He had left behind debts, a failing business, and a state. He set up a forge in the small community of Grand Detour, and in eighteen thirty-seven, using a piece of a broken steel saw blade, he made something that changed American agriculture.

The problem John Deere was solving was simple and urgent. The rich black soil of the Illinois prairie was nothing like the sandy ground of New England. It clung to cast-iron plows in dense, sticky sheets, and farmers had to stop every few feet to scrape the moldboard clean. Working the prairie was exhausting, slow, and enormously discouraging to families who had come west with plans.

Deere's insight was that polished steel, unlike rough iron, would scour itself clean as it moved through the soil. The curved steel blade would turn the earth and the earth would slide off. He tested the plow on a nearby farm, and it worked. Accounts from the period say that hundreds of people gathered to watch.

From that one plow in eighteen thirty-seven, he made two the following year and ten the year after that. By eighteen forty-eight he had moved his growing operation to Moline, on the Mississippi. The company he built became one of the largest corporations in American history.

The site of Deere's original Grand Detour blacksmith shop is now a National Historic Landmark, preserved and open to visitors. The limestone bluffs along the Rock River look more or less as they did when he drove that first steel blade into the Illinois ground.