The Brand That . . . . Turned the Prairie

This is the seventh profile in The Brand That…, a series about American brands that taught the country a habit, became the word for the thing itself, and outlived the world that made them. We tell their stories plainly and with respect — what they made, what it cost, and what they still are. And this profile is personal to me.

The Founding

He came to Illinois with his tools and his debts.

John Deere was a blacksmith from Rutland, Vermont, raised by a mother who kept the family together after the sea took his father. He had learned to polish steel until it shone, and he had learned that a man’s name meant whatever his last job was worth.

When the New England economy collapsed in 1836, he left it behind and set up a forge in Grand Detour, a bend in the Rock River where a stubborn Vermonter named Leonard Andrus was trying to build a town.

The prairie had a problem, and the problem was the dirt.

It was rich, black, and heavy, and it clung to a plow the way wet clay clings to a boot. The cast-iron plows that farmers had carried west were made for the sandy soils of the East, and in the Illinois loam they stopped every few feet, packed solid, useless until a man got down and scraped them clean by hand. It was work that broke the spirit before it broke the ground.

In 1837 Deere took a broken steel saw blade from the local sawmill, hammered out the teeth, curved it over a log, and polished it bright. The polished steel shed the soil as it moved. It scoured itself clean and kept going. Deere had not invented the steel plow — others had tried steel before him — but he had made the one that worked in that ground, and that was the whole of it.

The Rise

The first year he made one plow.

The next year, a few more.

By the mid-1840s he was making close to a thousand a year, and the thing that made him was not only the plow but how he sold it. Other blacksmiths waited for a farmer to walk in and place an order. Deere built the plows first, stacked them where a man could see them, and carried them out across the country to the farms. He was making a standard product before anyone asked for it, and betting the prairie would ask.

The prairie asked.

In 1848 he dissolved the partnership with Andrus — the two headstrong men had quarreled over the books and over a railroad Deere wanted and Andrus did not — and moved seventy miles to Moline, on the Mississippi, for the steel and the river and the water power. There he began with English steel and then got American mills to roll it for him. Sales climbed past ten thousand plows a year by the late 1850s. He handed the running of the business to his son Charles after the Panic of 1857, and in 1868 the firm was incorporated as Deere & Company.

John Deere died in Moline in 1886. The company he left had already become the word for the thing it made.

The deeper turn came later, in 1918, when Deere bought the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Company and with it a tractor.

Five years on it replaced the old Waterloo Boy with the John Deere Model D, green with yellow wheels, and entered the business it would come to rule. The company grew the way it always had — by making the standard thing and then buying whatever it did not yet make. Today it outsells every farm-machinery maker in the world, more than twice what its two nearest rivals sell together, and it holds better than half the American large-tractor market.

A farmer who buys the green machine also buys the dealer, the parts, the service, and the assurance that it will run when the field is ready.

That assurance, not the steel, became the thing Deere was really selling.

The Turn

Here the story breaks the pattern of this series. Most of these brands survived being bought and sold — passed hand to hand, absorbed, spun off, saved at the last minute. Deere was never any of those. Since 1868 it has been the same company, independent, publicly traded, run out of the same Illinois river town. It was not the acquired. It was the acquirer.

It bought the Waterloo tractor works in 1918, the world’s largest timber-harvesting machinery maker in 2000, the world’s largest road-building equipment maker in 2017 for five billion dollars. It licensed satellite-guidance software that traced back to a NASA laboratory and put it in tractors that now steer themselves down a row by the inch.

That was the turn: not a fall, but a hardening.

The plow became a platform. The polished steel that once shed the soil became polished software that the farmer could see but could not touch. And in that lock — the closed system, the thing the farmer owned but could not open — the trouble was already waiting.

The Reckoning

The tool that broke the plains helped break the ground beneath them. The steel plow let farmers tear open millions of acres of prairie grass, and Deere’s own 1935 manual urged them to pulverize the soil into a fine mulch. When the droughts and the winds came in the 1930s, that fine, rootless earth lifted into the sky. The Dust Bowl was many men’s doing, and much of it was weather, but the plow that turned the prairie also turned it loose, and the record does not let the triumph stand alone.

The sharper reckoning is nearer to now, and it is between Deere and the very farmer it was built to serve.

The company put digital locks in its tractors and harvesters and kept the diagnostic tools to itself, so that a farmer with a broken machine and a field going to seed could not fix it, and neither could the shop down the road.

He had to wait for the dealer and pay the dealer’s price. The downtime and the markups cost the industry billions a year, and the farmers — the most independent people in America — found they did not fully own the machines in their own barns.

In April 2026 Deere agreed to a ninety-nine-million-dollar settlement and promised to open its repair tools for ten years, admitting no wrong, the deal still awaiting a judge. The Federal Trade Commission’s own antitrust case against the company goes on, unresolved. The farmers won a truce, not the war, and a truce with a clock on it.

And there was the trouble inside the walls. In October 2021, ten thousand of Deere’s own union workers walked out for thirty-four days, the first big strike there in a generation, while the company drove toward record profit. They were tired of the long pandemic shifts and the two-tier wages that paid the younger workers less for the same labor. A man on the picket line in Milan, Illinois, fifty-six years old, was struck by a vehicle and killed. The workers held, and won their raise, and ended the lowest tier.

It is worth remembering that the green machines are built by people, and that the people once had to stop building them to be heard.

What Endures

Deere & Company is still in Moline, still independent, still trading under its own name.

Its headquarters there, a low dark building of unpainted weathering steel, was designed by Eero Saarinen and opened in 1964. The architect chose steel that rusts on purpose — a metal that oxidizes into a deep protective skin and then holds, weathering into the color of the earth it sits above. It is the truest monument the company has, because it says the thing the company has always half-known about itself: that steel left in the open changes, and that the change, handled right, is what makes it last.

The moat now is not the plow. It is the dealer network and the precision-farming technology and the data — the same closed system that started the repair fight is the same closed system that holds the farmer close. The green and yellow remain as fixed in the American eye as anything on a farm, and out past Grand Detour the original forge and homestead still stand, where a bankrupt blacksmith curved a broken saw blade over a log and found that the dirt would slide off clean. He had said he would never put his name on anything that did not carry the best that was in him. The name is still on the machines, and the argument now is only over who gets to open them.

John Deere turned the prairie, and that is worth remembering.

*   *   *   *   *

Why John Deere? It became the word for the plow, and then the word for the tractor, by making the standard tool before the country knew it needed one — and it outlived the world that made it not by being bought or saved but by owning the whole system around the machine, the dealer and the parts and the code, which is the same thing that made it, and holds it, and haunts it still.

Afterword: The Boxes from Moline and a Personal Note

In 1975 I was Finance Chairman for the President Ford Committee in Illinois. One of my regional chairmen was William Hewitt, who was then the chairman of Deere & Company.

I went to see him in Moline. He gave me a tour. The building was the Saarinen building, the low dark one made of steel that rusts on purpose, and Hewitt was the man who had commissioned it.

Somewhere in that tour I saw the models — the tractors and the implements, scaled down and set out on display — and I said something about how fine they were. That was all. It was the kind of thing a man says walking through another man’s house.

Two weeks later two boxes came to my home. They were the models. I never gave them to my sons to play with. They went on a shelf, and they have been on a shelf ever since — the tractors, the plows, the spreaders, the combine with its yellow reel.

They are still there. My grandchildren have looked at them through the glass the way I looked at them in Moline.

I did not know then what I know now.

Hewitt had married Patricia Deere Wiman, the great-great-granddaughter of the blacksmith who curved the saw blade. Her father ran the company before him, and when her father died in 1955 they made Hewitt president twelve days later.

He was the last of the Deere line to run Deere.

When he retired in 1982 the company passed out of the family for the first time in its history.

He was not a man who married into a fortune and left it alone.

He took Deere from three hundred million dollars a year to nearly six billion, and he took a company that sold to American farmers and made it sell to the world.

Somebody asked him once why he had spent the money on Saarinen, on a headquarters out in the Illinois fields, and he gave the whole answer in one line: to get good people, you have to have an attractive place.

He believed a thing worth doing was worth doing well, and that the way you treat a man is part of the work.

That is the same instinct that put two boxes on a truck.

He had also been a naval officer in the Pacific, nine battle stars, and he came home and went to work. Neither of us mentioned any of that. Two Navy men in a room in Illinois, talking about tractors.

I have thought about why I kept them that way. It was not that they were valuable. It was that a very busy man running a great company remembered an offhand remark from a visitor and did something about it, quietly, and asked for nothing in return.

That is a small thing. Small things are what a man’s character is made of, and they are what he is remembered by.

Bill Hewitt is gone now. The building still stands, and the steel has taken its color. And the little green machines are on my shelf in Chicago, turning nothing, needing no repair, belonging entirely to me.

The line that began with a blacksmith and a broken saw blade ended with the man who sent me the boxes.

I will always remember Bill Hewitt. I will always remember the brand.

~ CCJ

Deere.

The models from Moline, on display in the author’s home. A gift from William Hewitt, Chairman of Deere & Company, 1975.

Charles C. Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard the nuclear submarine USS Ray (SSN 653), where his tactical innovations helped inspire Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. He developed the Field Studies methodology to teach “Critical Skills” and was endorsed by the Department of Labor in 1994. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts three podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog and Civic Sage platforms on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.