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Up next, the story of the man who tamed the soil of our heartland. and became the founder of a company whose products most can recognize solely because of their green coat of paint. Here's Kirk Higgins, the senior director of content. at the Bill of Rights Institute. With a story.
of John Deere. The green machines are instantly recognizable across America. Tractors, combines, balers, lawnmowers, painted in that distinctive bright green coat with yellow accents. Even from a distance, most people know who made them. John Deere.
For the past 187 years, John Deere has been an American business success story. The company's technology tamed the soil of America's heartland, helping make it possible for us not just to expand to the West, but thrive there too, and realize our prairie's great potential. But who was John Deere? Not just the company and the brand, but the man behind it all. John Deere was born in February of 1804 in Vermont.
He never really knew his father, who in eighteen oh eight set sail for England. He never returned and was presumed to have drowned during his voyage. His mother was left alone to raise the family. Growing up in near poverty meant that young John looked for work to help support the family from an early age. As a young teenager, in exchange for some money, a pair of shoes and some old clothes, he took a job at a tannery.
At seventeen, Deere would receive his mother's blessing, To leave home to apprentice under Captain Benjamin Lawrence, a reputable Vermont blacksmith. It was long, hot, and difficult work. but it was excellent on-the-job training for Deere. He was also paid for his work, $30 for his first year, an additional $5 for each year that followed. By 1826, Deere was ready to end his apprenticeship and begin working to support his own growing family.
Over the next several years, he would continue working as a blacksmith, producing various household items like pots and pans, to shoeing horses, to furnishing ironwork for stagecoaches and mills. Work was easy to come by. A tragedy would strike again. Deer's Blacksmith's shop would burn down not once, but twice. The first time dented his bank account.
Second time? put his family in serious debt. Then in 1836, Deere received a summons from the village of Leicester demanding he pay $78.76 to a lender. Not paying would mean, at best, losing his land, and, at worst, he could face debtor's prison. In the United States of eighteen thirty six, declaring bankruptcy was not an option.
And if someone like Robert Morris, one of America's founders and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, could end up in a debtor's prison for three years, so could a Vermont blacksmith like John Deere. The economic climate in Vermont had become challenging, too. The state had faced years of deforestation and grasshopper plagues and significant losses to the fertile soil. John Deere was truly stuck between a rock and a hard place, and while lost to history, whether it was his debts, the threat of prison, or the failing soil that motivated him. A deer left Vermont in 1836 with just $73 in his pocket.
made his way to Grand Detour, Illinois. At 32, he was starting his life over. Deere rented some land on a river, set up a smithy, and his family joined him in their new home within a year. To say his services were in demand in Grand Detour undersells the need. They were essential.
During the first half of the nineteenth century the fertile expanse of the western prairies drew thousands of settlers. With this rapid growth came a growing demand for skilled tradesmen like blacksmiths, who could shoe the oxen needed for plowing, create knives and silverware, and repair broken tools needed to run farms. John Deere could do it all, and the two things he hadn't left behind in Vermont, his diligent work ethic and Eye for Perfection, served him well and were noticed by many. A clerk who worked across the street from Deere's Smithy recalled. I had heard Deere's hammering in the morning when I was in the store in bed at 4 o'clock and at 10 o'clock at night.
he had such an indomitable determination to do. and work what he had in his mind. he would soon set his mind to his next challenge. taming the difficult Midwestern soil that was giving farmers fits. Many farmers in the region were accustomed to the drier, pebbly soil of New England.
but the soil in the Midwest was often very different. It was sticky, clumped.
Some farmers spent more time knocking soil off their plows than actually plowing, and the problem was threatening to send many farmers back east. John Deere was intimately familiar with the problems farmers were having. After all, it was his job to fix their broken. plows. And in eighteen thirty seven, just a year after having moved to Illinois, John Deere thought he had a solution.
Dear reason that a highly polished, curved plow blade would cut through the soil easily and that dirt would not stick to it.
So he He took a broken steel saw blade, cut and molded it. and created his first prototype of a steel self-cleaning plow. and was met with plenty of scepticism from local farmers. But can you blame them? The farmers had suffered through backbreaking labor, trying to make a living day in and day out.
It would have been hard to believe that any device could cut easily through the thick, sticky prairie soil. Let alone a device a neighbor had made out of scrap metal. But Deere was committed to working on his concept. That same year, when John Deere tested the plow, his biggest critics would turn out to watch. They stood in silence as Deere walked it up and down a friend's field without stopping.
According to one account, a farmer looked at the blade afterwards and exclaimed, by cracky, she's clean. But the palau wasn't just clean, it was light. light enough for a strong man to carry. Could this really be the beginning of the end for the heavy, oxen-driven plows Midwestern farmers needed to make a living? For 8,000 years, the plow had roughly remained the same.
But here was something truly astonishing. but the year after Deere demonstrated his new plow you could count on one hand the number he sold. Three. The following year, he filled ten orders. The truth of the matter wasn't that Deere was a bad salesman.
or that his product wasn't good enough. it was that steel was hard to come by. Most of it had to be imported from England. Also, Deere neither had the money nor the capacity to fashion more than a handful of plows a year. As such, Deere would continue the day-to-day routine of blacksmithing anything and everything needed for the local community.
community. until he decided to risk everything and place his bets entirely on his plow. It was a decision that worked out for him. He began to manufacture his plows in advance and recruited farmers to help sell his plows on commission and exhibited a model with the sign self-polisher in front of his shop. The business model, much like his plow, was novel for the time.
Most businesses made their products when orders came in. Also, Deere's idea of displaying models of equipment that were not for purchase was really a new concept. Deere wasn't just a good blacksmith, he was a natural businessman. And in 1846, deer manufactured about a thousand plows and had a factory. Deere and his company eventually outgrew Grand Detour, Illinois.
So in 1847, Deere established a plow factory in Moline, Illinois. on the banks of the Mississippi. Building a factory in Moline made it easy for Deere to import steel from Pittsburgh, as well as to increase his distribution range. Riverboats could now swing right by the factory. By 1856, Deere's Moline Plow Works was producing 13,000 plows a year.
Moline remains the global headquarters for the John Deere Company to this day. The years of Moline were not all easy for John Deere. He battled copycat manufacturers and had problems managing an expanding dealer network. Still, as Deere's business continued to grow, it became a family affair. his second oldest son, Charles, began working for the business at the age of sixteen.
In eighteen fifty eight, when he was just twenty one years old, Charles Deere assumed primary management duties for the company. and he would guide it for nearly half a century. Charles, for his part, was an incredible businessman. He'd travel to farms to demonstrate his father's products in action. Hmm.
1970s had one of the company's products, a corn planter, painted green and yellow. In 1918, when the company released its first marketable tractor, it became standard for all John Deere products to be painted that way. As for John Deere himself, even as he reduced his role at the company he founded, he'd stay plenty busy in the community. He even served as mayor of Moline. Politically, Deere was a Whig, a staunch abolitionist and supporter of Abraham Lincoln.
Interesting side note, John Deere met Abraham Lincoln during one of Lincoln's most important cases as a trial lawyer. In 1856, a steamboat named Effie Afton. Crashed into the Rock Island Bridge, the first railroad bridge over the Mississippi River. The steamboat owners sought damages, and the case sparked national attention. It pitted steamboats against railroads and raised questions about whether the railroad bridges were dangerous for boats.
Lincoln was one of the attorneys representing the railroad company, and Deere testified on the company's behalf. Lincoln and the railroad company ultimately prevailed, which paved the way for railroads to further open the West to development. Over time, John Deere and his company helped make that development possible too. Deere's products were helping to tame the prairies. We're supporting small and large-scale farming that help make America the breadbasket.
of the world. John Deere died on May 17, 1886, at the age of 82. Legendary businessman and adventure. who had helped tame the prairies was gone. but his story was far from over.
The company that coined the slogan, Nothing Runs Like a Deer, is, indeed, still running. 187 years after its founder, hard-working blacksmith by trade. overcame adversity and fought his way to success. demonstrated a single handmade plow on a borrowed field. And a special thanks to Kirk Higgins.
He's the Senior Director of Content. At the Bill of Rights Institute, the story of John Deere, the blacksmith who transformed America's prairies. Here on Our American Stories. Time for a sofa upgrade? Introducing Anibay sofas, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices.
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