John Deere was an American blacksmith and manufacturer who founded Deere & Company, one of the largest and leading agricultural and construction equipment manufacturers in the world.
He married in 1827 to Demarias Lamb and fathered nine children.
He was a blacksmith by training and by trade. Business conditions weren’t very good in Vermont, so in 1836, Deere decided to move out West to Illinois. There, he found that the traditional wood and iron plows used back East were no match for the farms out West. While New England soil was light and sandy, the prairie sod was heavy and thick. Farmers had to stop frequently to clean soil and clay off of their plow blades. Deere had the idea that a properly shaped blade would scour itself as it went along. He experimented with some new designs and the use of steel , and by 1838 he’d sold three of them to local farmers. He sold 10 the following year, and 40 the year after that. By 1841, he was making and selling a hundred plows a year. Deere’s innovation became known as “The Plow that Broke the Plains.”
Have you taken a DNA test? If so, login to add it. If not, see our friends at Ancestry DNA.
John is 10 degrees from John Adams, 13 degrees from Calvin Coolidge, 17 degrees from Dwight Eisenhower, 13 degrees from John Hanson, 13 degrees from William Harrison, 15 degrees from Thomas Jefferson, 14 degrees from Abraham Lincoln, 14 degrees from James Monroe, 12 degrees from Franklin Roosevelt, 14 degrees from Martin Van Buren, 15 degrees from George Washington and 17 degrees from Jana Diamond on our single family tree. Login to find your connection.