Moline, Illinois: Where the Steel Plow Changed Everything

The Mississippi River bend where Moline sits was not chosen at random. When John Deere moved his plow operation here in eighteen forty-eight, he was following the logic of industrial geography: steamboats to bring in the steel, a waterfall on the Rock River to power the equipment, and a river highway to ship the finished product downstream to farms across the continent.

Deere had already made the crucial invention. In eighteen thirty-seven, working as a blacksmith in Grand Detour, Illinois, he had noticed that the cast-iron plows farmers were using from the East simply could not handle the thick, sticky prairie soil. It clung to the blade and had to be scraped off every few yards. Deere fashioned a new blade from a broken circular saw blade, highly polished steel that shed the soil cleanly as it turned. The prairie, which had defeated wooden and iron plows, yielded to it. By the early eighteen forties he was producing hundreds of plows a year.

Moline became Deere's permanent home and the center of what grew into the largest agricultural equipment manufacturer in the world. By the time of the Civil War, tens of thousands of Deere plows were breaking the sod of the Great Plains every season. Deere himself served as Moline's second mayor and lived here until his death in eighteen eighty-six. The John Deere Commons now occupies land near the site of the original factory.

The downtown commercial district you are passing through reflects the prosperity that Deere and the farm equipment trade built. The thirty-three acres of commercial and industrial buildings along Fifth Avenue, added to the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand seven, date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Moline was one of the most productive manufacturing cities in the Midwest. The Quad Cities built America's food supply. Moline handed it the plow.