Ray and Gary Purvis show their new John Deere, Bratt-1990.
There is an old saying that was often used by a favorite teacher in my elementary school days. It is recalled roughly as follows, "Mighty oaks from small acorns grow". The history of the United States is filled with stories that are examples of this phrase, here is one.
He was born in Vermont in 1804. As a boy he received the standard minimum education of a few years and then served four years as a blacksmith apprentice, his name was John Deere.
In 1827 John married a lady from the nearby town of Granville. The couple would eventually have nine children. With a new family, John decided to open his own business. In the next decade he established himself as a master blacksmith. But, after losses of two shops to fire and a failing local economy, things looked down in Vermont.
Excited by stories of the New West, John sold his business and temporarily left his family to join the pioneers of the new western expansion. Taking only the necessary tools of his trade, after months of travel in 1837 he arrived in the new territory of Illinois. Within two days, he had established a new blacksmith shop; his family would follow a year later.
Almost immediately John began to hear complaints from settlers of the difficult plowing in the heavy, sticky soil of the new country using the wide, shallow cast iron plows brought from the east. The term used by farmers of the time that described a good cut to throw the soil from the blade was "scour", and plows could not scour this soil well.
Seeing the need for a new type of device, John created a design that he thought would throw the dirt from the edge of the plow. The blade of his first effort was made from a scrapped mill-saw blade. The support brackets were fashioned from cast iron and the beam and handles he shaved down from white oak. After weeks of work, John shouldered his plow and carried it to the river where he climbed into a rowboat and rowed across the river to the farm of Mr. Crandall. The soil here was notorious as dirt that no plow could scour. Now already known to his neighbors as an inventor, John hooked his plow up to Crandall's mule as a large crowd of curious farmers gathered along the field. Picking up the plow handles and cutting a straight furrow along the field, the farmers saw the black gooey soil fall cleanly from the face of the plow. John Deere had created the first steel plow.
The plow quickly became known as "John Deere's Self-Polisher". In the years that followed, John produced a thousand plows a year to keep up with demand. In 1847 John again moved his family, this time to Moline, Illinois, where there was good water power, nearby coal and cheap river transportation. It was here that he built his first true factory. In 1848 for his new factory, the first plow steel made in America was produced under his direction.
The river traffic and later railway distribution made for a steady and rapid growth of the John Deere plow. As demand increased, he built fifty plows of special design that could be used in different soils of the country. Success of these products increased demand and required additions to his factory.
In 1868 John Deere reorganized his business under the name Deere and Company. He made his son secretary and business manager. Soon after, the company began a successful new type of service, a series of shops located across the agricultural belt called branch houses. These houses displayed every product offered by the company so they could be seen and handled by expected buyers.
At the time of John Deere's death in 1886, Deere and Company was producing not only plows, but also cultivators, corn and cotton planters and an assortment of implements. The company continued to prosper and in 1910 was reorganized again with the merger of six noncompeting manufacturing companies and twenty two selling organizations, with each section of the company assigned to set up independent product lines and research. By the 1920s the company was producing gasoline tractors, one product line of the company's ten factories of 1930. Today the John Deere name represents the pinnacle of farm equipment used by America's farmers, as well as those around the world.
"Mighty oaks from small acorns grow." The idea that great things can result from a simple idea is a basis of the American Ideal. Ponder these few words for a moment and think of the seeds you might have planted.
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