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GO WEST YOUNG MAN
THE BLACKSMITH
MASS APPEAL
NOTHING RUNS LIKE A DEERE
COMMITMENT
LEGENDARY
LEAPING FORWARD
THE CLASSIC
“I will never put my name on a product that does not have in it the best that is in me.”
In 1962, a University pragmatic play of Illinois archaeological team unearthed the exact location of the blacksmith shop where John Deere developed the first successful steel plow in 1837. The site is now preserved by an exhibit hall complete with a simulated conversation between John and Demarius Deere talking about their every events on the farm and his development of the self-polishing steel plow that eventually opened the prairie to agriculture.
As a young journeyman blacksmith in Middlebury, Vermont, John Deere soon gained fame for his considerable workmanship and ingenuity. It was a golden age of the burgeoning pioneer and John headed west to join the adventure. It took him many weeks by canal boat, lake boat and stagecoach to reach Grand Detour, Illinois a journey of more than a thousand miles that could easily be accomplished in 16 hours by car today.
BLACKSMITH
The cast iron plows the pioneers used were designed for sandy New England and proved no match for the rich Midwestern soil. So Deere decided to come up with something better, he took an old steel saw blade and made a plow with a properly shaped moldboard and share that scoured itself as it turned the furrow slice, basically
