Deere arrived in an agricultural era when innovators sought a solution to the bane of farmers: soil stubbornly clinging to the plow blade ... needed more steel. By the mid-1800s, the U.S. was ...

Tradition holds that this plow, held in the Smithsonian collections, is one of the first three plows that John Deere personally forged. National Museum of American History In 1837 in an Illinois ...