July 2002

July 2002

Aimee and I took a ride out to the Quad Cities area to learn about John Deere. The corporate Pavilion in downtown Moline is mostly about the line of tractors and harvesters Deere sells today. There is almost nothing about John Deere, the founder.

We had a nice lunch of chicken wraps at the exhibit house and drove to the historic site in Grand Detour near Dixon, IL. John Deere was a blacksmith from Vermont. His 1837 plow innovation was to replace the cast iron blade with a highly polished steel one. The thick Midwest turf didn’t stick to it, making farmers more efficient. Demand exploded for the “The Plow that broke the Plains”. In 1848 Deere moved his operation to the river port of Moline.

On the way home we stopped by Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home in Dixon. Congress recently authorized the National Park Service to buy the house and establish a Ronald Reagan National Historic Site.