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Industry History | John Deere — The Forge at Illinois and Clinton, Grand Detour
· 1837
Personal memoryBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Industry History | John Deere — The Forge at Illinois and Clinton, Grand Detour
kevin
1837
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People treat John Deere as a Moline campus that arrived already painted green and yellow.
The first steel plow left a blacksmith shop here, in Grand Detour, in 1837.
John Deere, a Vermont smith, reached this bend of the Rock River in 1836 after work dried up in New England.
Leonard Andrus had founded the village two years earlier.
Within days Deere had a forge.
Cast-iron plows that worked in eastern soils packed with sticky Illinois prairie loam and had to be scraped every few yards.
In 1837 he took a broken sawmill blade and shaped a polished steel moldboard.
The point was not that steel was unknown.
John Lane had tried a steel plow in Lockport four years earlier.
The point was a surface that would scour itself as it cut.
Farmers could keep walking.
He made one such plow that year.
Two in 1838.
Ten in 1839.
Forty in 1840.
Seventy-five in 1841.
One hundred in 1842.
The second surviving plow, dated 1838, is in the Smithsonian.
The original 1837 implement is lost.
Steel was scarce on the frontier.
Deere later bought English plate from Naylor and Company through a St. Louis house.
When the railroad bypassed Grand Detour he moved the works seventy miles southwest to Moline in 1848, onto the Mississippi.
Deere and Company was incorporated in 1868.
The house he built in 1836 still stands at Illinois and Clinton Streets.
The original shop does not.
Archaeologists from the University of Illinois uncovered its footprint in 1962.
A replica forge now sits beside the excavation pavilion.
The site became a National Historic Landmark in 1964.
The pin is the public historic lot, not a working factory.
Photo: John Deere House and the replica shop at Grand Detour, IvoShandor, via Wikimedia Commons.
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