John Deere was the inventor of the first commercially successful steel-moldboard plow, as well as the founder, president, and proprietor of Deere & Company from 1837-1886.

John Deere was born February 7, 1804 in Rutland, Vermont to William Deere and Sarah Yates Deere.

When he was four years old,  his father left for England and subsequently disappeared, leaving John’s mother to raise him alone.

John attended Middlebury College for a brief period of time before studying as a blacksmith’s apprentice. When he was just seventeen John Deere went to apprentice and work for a successful blacksmith by the name of Captain Benjamin Lawrence.

By 1826, John entered the black-smithing trade himself, working in Burlington before opening his own shops in Vergennes and then Leicester, Vermont.

John married Demarius Lamb-Deer in 1827 and the two of them had nine children together.

A few years later in 1837, John and his family settled in Grand Detour, Illinois. He had no problem finding a job due to the lack of blacksmiths in the area, and soon found the cast-iron plows were not working well in the prairie soil of the midwest.

He found himself making the same repairs to plows over and over and over again, realizing the wood and cast-iron plow used in the East was not conducive to breaking up the thick, heavy soils of the prairie.

Remembering how he used to polish is father’s sewing needles by running them through sand in the tailor shop, John concluded a correctly shaped moldboard made of highly polished steel would work better in the sticky clay soil conditions of Illinois.

In 1837, John Deere developed and manufactured the first commercially cast-steel plow, and by 1838 he completed his first steel plow, selling it to local farmer Lewis Crandall.