The story of Deere & Company begins not in a boardroom or a financier's office but in a forge fire burning in a small Illinois river town in the winter of 1836 to 1837, where a 33-year-old Vermont-born blacksmith named John Deere was struggling to make ends meet and simultaneously solving a problem that was defeating thousands of frontier farmers attempting to settle the American Midwest. John Deere was born on February 7, 1804, in Rutland, Vermont, the son of William Rinold Deere and Sarah Yates. His father disappeared on a voyage to England when John was four years old—believed drowned—and his mother raised him in straitened circumstances in Middlebury, Vermont. At seventeen, Deere apprenticed as a blacksmith under Benjamin Lawrence in Middlebury, learning the trade that would define his life and eventually transform American agriculture. He served four years of apprenticeship and two more years as a journeyman, developing a reputation for producing high-quality, finely finished tools—a standard of craftsmanship that would later become the John Deere brand's foundational identity. By the early 1830s, Deere had established his own smithy in Vermont, but the New England economy was struggling, credit was tight, and opportunities for a craftsman with ambition but limited capital were constrained. In 1836, he made the decision that countless Americans of his generation were making: he went west. Leaving behind his wife Demarius and their children—who would follow later—Deere traveled to Grand Detour, Illinois, a small settlement on a sharp bend of the Rock River, approximately 100 miles west of Chicago. There, he found a community of settlers desperate for a blacksmith. He established his shop and quickly prospered, but it was the conversations he had with his farming customers that sparked the innovation that would change everything. The problem was the soil. Eastern cast-iron plows worked adequately in the sandy, light soils of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, but the rich, sticky clay-loam soils of the Illinois prairie were a fundamentally different challenge. The dense prairie earth clung to cast-iron plow surfaces, forcing farmers to stop every few steps to scrape the mold board clean—a laborious process that dramatically slowed plowing and made large-scale prairie cultivation economically prohibitive. Some farmers gave up entirely and reported that Illinois prairie soil was simply unworkable. Deere, with the instincts of a skilled craftsman and the curiosity of a practical engineer, began experimenting with solutions. The breakthrough reportedly came when Deere noticed the highly polished surface of a broken steel saw blade in his shop—the kind of smooth, self-scouring surface that might shed sticky clay rather than accumulating it. Working in his forge through the winter of 1837, Deere fashioned a plow with a moldboard cut from a polished steel saw blade. The result was transformative: the steel plow's smooth, specially shaped surface caused the prairie soil to curl off cleanly rather than adhering, eliminating the constant scraping and making continuous plowing of Illinois prairie soil genuinely practical for the first time. The year 1837—the same year the United States was gripped by the Panic of 1837, a financial crisis that sent much of the country into deep recession—was thus the founding year of what would become the world's most important agricultural equipment company. Deere initially produced only two or three plows that first year, each one essentially custom-fabricated. By 1838, he was making ten plows. By 1840, forty. By 1842, approximately one hundred. Word spread rapidly through the farming communities of northern Illinois: a blacksmith in Grand Detour had a plow that actually worked on prairie soil. Farmers came from considerable distances to purchase or commission one, and many who couldn't travel sent orders by post. The scale of demand quickly exceeded what a single blacksmith's shop could supply, and by 1843, Deere entered into a partnership with Leonard Andrus, a businessman who could provide capital and business management capabilities that the technically gifted but financially unsophisticated Deere lacked. This partnership produced the first significant expansion of what would become Deere & Company, including a move to Moline, Illinois in 1848 to take advantage of the Mississippi River waterpower and improved transportation for raw materials and finished goods. The move to Moline—which remains Deere's headquarters to this day—was a pivotal strategic decision. The Mississippi provided water power for manufacturing machinery, ice-free navigation for much of the year to move steel from Pittsburgh and finished plows to markets down the river and across the prairie, and access to a growing community of skilled metalworkers and mechanics attracted to the river towns of the Upper Midwest. In Moline, Deere reorganized his business, ended the partnership with Andrus under difficult circumstances, and established the operation that would directly evolve into Deere & Company. By 1850, the Moline factory was producing over 1,600 plows annually. By 1857, that figure had grown to approximately 10,000 plows per year—a scaling velocity that demonstrated both the extraordinary depth of demand for effective prairie farming implements and Deere's emerging capability as a production manufacturer rather than a craft artisan.