John Deere

The history of John Deere

John Deere is named after a blacksmith, and the company still carries his argument about spending money.

He was born in Rutland, Vermont, on 7 February 1804. The business dates from 1837, when he made the first commercially successful self-scouring steel plough — the tool that made the heavy clay of the prairie workable, because soil slid off polished steel instead of clinging to cast iron.

Two stories about that plough are told as tradition rather than as record, and the source tells them that way: that the idea came from watching his mother knit, and noticing that polished steel needles did not catch in the wool; and that the first plough was made from an old saw blade.

He moved the firm to Moline, Illinois, on the Mississippi, in 1848, and Deere & Company is headquartered there still. It was incorporated in 1868 on $150,000 of capital from four shareholders, which makes it one of the oldest companies in the United States trading under its founding name. The leaping deer first appeared as a mark in 1876, then with four legs, antlers swept backwards and a tree trunk beneath it.

The reply to a shareholder who thought the company spent too much developing new products is also given as tradition: either we improve our products, or somebody else will.

Caterpillar sold its combine business to Deere in 1926 and the two agreed to divide the ground — Caterpillar stepping back from agricultural machinery and wheeled tractors. The Depression nearly took the company with it: turnover fell from $63 million to $8.7 million between 1931 and 1933 and the workforce was cut to not far off a quarter of its size. The company carried farmers who could not pay, and the source credits that with the loyalty that followed. Between 1927 and 1932 it sold 8,200 tractors to the Soviet Union.

The move abroad came later. Taking over Heinrich Lanz AG in Mannheim in 1956, together with a Mexican holding, laid the groundwork for building tractors outside North America; Australia followed in 1959. By 1963, with lawn and grounds equipment added to the range, Deere had displaced International Harvester as the largest maker of agricultural machinery in the world.

Written from Traktorenlexikon: John Deere, Wikibooks, CC BY-SA 4.0 · retrieved 2026-09-14. Our words, not the source's.