|
Happy Birthday, John Deere!
John Deere. "The Vermont blacksmith, transplanted to the Illinois prairies, who turned his skill to building a plow that would scour in the gumbo land, thus making possible the building of an inland agricultural empire."
That's how a photo caption reads in Implement and Tractor from January 9, 1937. Below is the segment of a story that details John Deere's upbringing in Vermont. "John Deere came into the world, February 7, 1804, the last of four children in his family, and with no other heritage other than an ancestry of rugged, hard working, honest forebears could hand down. His birthplace was Rutland, Vermont, but in his infant years the family transferred its abode to Middlebury, a few miles distant. His ancestry was English. William Ryland Deere, his father, a merchant tailer [sic], had come from England. His mother, Sarah Yates Deere, was the daughter of a British solider who had fought the Yankees during the Revolutionary War, but who stayed to become a loyal American citizen when that conflict ended. "John Deere spent his first three decades in this little Otter Creek valley of his birth. It was circumscribed on the east by the Green Mountains and on the west by Lake Champlain. Beyond these barriers was a great outside world of which but little was known, but which unfolded a panorama of promise and mystery to the ambitious lad who frequently climbed the highest peaks. In the valley itself Nature provided almost as much in the annual maple sugar harvest as the farmers could produce from their labbors on the rocky hillsides the rest of the year.
"Tragedy, hard work and a little schooling were his early lot. When he was but eight, his father left on a trip to England. The boat on which he had sailed arrived safely in port, but the father was missing. His fate was never known. But still preserved is his last message to the family, a letter to his young son John, written from the port from which he sailed, urging the youngster to "Take good care of your mother." "Sarah Deere continued in the tailor shop until her death in 1826 with such help as her children could give. Young John having no inclinations toward the tailoring trade began to seek other opportunities for himself. Early in his teens he obtained employment grinding bark for a Middlebury tanner, for which he received a suit of clothes and a pair of shoes. For a brief period one winter he attended Middlebury College, upon the insistence of his mother. "But restlessness and a yearning for the practical rather than the theoretical was early to cast him in the role of a blacksmith. He apprenticed himself for four years to a Captain Benjamin Lawrence, his remuneration for the first year being thirty dollars. His pay increased five dollars annually, so that during his final year he received forty-five dollars. "For four years an apt pupil was learning from an able master. He learned to strike while the iron was hot, to finish the job of the first heat whenever possible and that trueness in directing the hammer was even more important than its power. "In the civilization of a century ago the blacksmith shop was second to no other institution in importance. From it came the hand tools of the farmer, and it was a day when these were the principal equipment of agriculture. Local artisans called upon the blacksmith to produce the tools for their trades. The more ornamental iron work no known as builders' hardware, and other equipment for the home, were produced principally in local blacksmith shops. Sharpening plowshares, shoeing oxen and horses, repairing scythes, pitchforks and cradles and wagon work of various kinds kept the facilities of the local shops continuously engaged.
"The better blacksmiths took pride in the skilled workmanship of which they were capable. They produced finished products. Such a blacksmith was Captain Lawrence. Such was John Deere, the apprentice, when he went forth into the world on his own as his "bounden" days were ended. "John Deere's next few years, the formative period of his life, show definitive, but slow progress toward his ultimate goal. For a short time he worked in another Middlebury blacksmith shop for fifteen dollars a month. He went to Burlington the next year, where he was employed to do wrought iron work on a saw mill and later for a flax mill. Next he became a partner in a shop at Vergennes where Otter Creek empties into Lake Champlain. Still later he owned shops of his own in Leicester and Hancock. "During these years, although material rewards were very meagre [sic], the John Deere of history was beginning to assert itself. The John Deere who was sharpening plowshares for the farmers was learning how the soil was dulling the edges, and was developing a better technique in sharpening them than his contemporaries at the forge. "Idle hours were spent in making shovels, hoes and pitchforks. He was producing ahead of his customers' requirements, they didn't have to wait, and they approved of such enterprise. Years later on a visit John Deere found some of them still in service after nearly three score years. He built new types of forks which were better suited to handling hay and manure. The manufacturing genius the world was later to know was already at work--in a little Vermont Valley where nothing ever happened. It was building ahead, putting quality in its products and creating. "In this setting John Deere doubtless would have lived a most successful life, but a larger world of opportunity was calling." Next week, stay tuned for a special overview of John Deere's life story as told in a colorful insert of the Jan. 9, 1937 edition of Implement and Tractor magazine. Copyright 2002 Brenda Kruse |
