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John Deere was born on February 7, 1804 in the farming community of Rutland, Vermont. He was raised by his mother in the nearby college-town of Middlebury, where he received a common-school education. A blacksmith by trade, Deere completed his apprenticeship in 1825 and began work as a journeyman. He moved four times in four years, providing hay forks and shovels to the farmers of western Vermont. In 1827, John Deere married Demarius Lamb, the daughter of a prominent family from Granville, and purchased land in the town of Hancock. Tragedy struck, however, when fire destroyed Deere's shop and left the young couple and their four children nearly destitute. In 1836, Deere sold his failing business to his father-in-law and, like many other Vermonters, departed for the American West in search of opportunity.
Deere settled to the west of Chicago in the village of Grand Detour, Illinois. Because the area lacked a blacksmith, Deere soon built a business shoeing horses and repairing plows. The local farmers, many of them emigrants from New England, were frustrated by the hardened topsoil of the Midwestern prairie. Their cast-iron plows were suitable for the lighter soils of the East, but clung to the heavier soils they now tried to till. Deere's solution, a self-scouring steel plow, revolutionized American agriculture and industry. Unlike other blacksmiths, Deere began to manufacture plows before he had orders for them. Using whatever steel materials he could find, Deere forged his so-called "self-polishers" and traveled the countryside in search of customers. To keep up with demand, he began to import rolled steel first from England, and then from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In 1848, just ten years after developing his first plow, Deere opened a second factory in Moline, Illinois. Soon, the fledgling Deere & Company was producing 1,000 plows per year. Although some of his business partners believed that product redesign was unnecessary, Deere continued to emphasize research and development. In 1858, John Deere turned turn over management of the company to his son Charles, who had joined the business five years earlier at the age of 16. The elder Deere then devoted the later part of his life to social, political and philanthropic causes. He died on May 17, 1886.
References:
https://www.deere.com/en/our-company/about-john-deere/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Deere
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