I won't drag the whole thing here; here's the coolest thing at the show. If you want more, click here.

 

Neat stuff; I didn't realize John Deere was established in the days of horse reliant farming.

John Deere was a skilled blacksmith who migrated from Vermont to Illinois around 1836.

 

Farmers who moved West to the prairies brought with them the cast-iron plows that worked well in New England's sandy soils, but the sticky clay soils of the midwest clung to the plows and made plowing an arduous task with frequent stops to scrape clinging soil from the plowshares.

 

In 1837 Deere fashioned a polished steel self-scouring plowshare from a discarded broken saw blade from a sawmill, and it worked superbly. He began making steel plows that were well-received, and manufacturing started in earnest when he moved to Moline and built a factory there in 1848. The company dates its beginning to that year. The company was already seventy years old, with a diverse line of farm tools, when they began negotiating for the purchase of the Waterloo engines and tractors.

 

J.I. Case started up a few years later, in 1852 in Racine Wisconsin, manufacturing machines for threshing wheat (separating grain from straw). Case introduced a line of steam engines for agriculture around 1880, and began experimenting with internal combustion with limited success in 1892. They introduced their first production kerosene tractors in 1912.