Magic Happened: Chapter 10

A Deere Friend

The village smithy whose self-scouring steel plow helped the Quad Cities grow into the Farm Implement Capital of the World had much in common with the tenacious, unsinkable golf tournament that has borne his name since 1998.

John Deere was 4 years old in 1808 when his father, William — a tailor with a prosperous business in the bustling village of Middlebury, Vermont — boarded a ship in Boston Harbor, bound for a visit to his native England.

In “The John Deere Story: A Biography of Plowmakers John & Charles Deere,” Moline natives Neil and Jeremy Dahlstrom said history offers no clear record of what fate befell William Deere after he stepped onto that boat. The authors suggest such possibilities as a pirate attack, a shipwreck, or forced conscription into His Majesty’s Royal Navy. One unconfirmed account hinted the ship arrived safely with Deere’s trunk in tow, but said the father of six was not aboard.

The lone certainty is that William Deere was never again seen by his wife, Sarah, and the six children he left behind.

In his early teens, John Deere worked for a tanner to bring money home to help his mother keep the family fed. At 17, he left home to serve a four-year apprenticeship under a Middlebury blacksmith. His starting annual salary of $30 increased by $5 each year, and the apprenticeship included room and board.

Deere set out on his own in 1825, using borrowed money to build two blacksmith shops that each quickly burned to the ground. Between 1828 and 1833, Deere took a wife, started a family, and moved no fewer than five times across the lowlands of Vermont to find work as a hired-hand blacksmith.

A few years after Deere opted again to risk debt to open a shop of his own, President Andrew Jackson’s war on the national banking system caused the “Panic of 1837,” leading mortgage holders to call in loans. John Deere wasn’t alone in lacking the means to pay his debts in full, the Dahlstroms wrote, and he also wasn’t alone in heading west to start anew while averting a possible stint in debtor’s prison.

Deere’s trek via canals, Great Lakes, and horse-drawn wagons eventually led to Grand Detour, Illinois. There, on the banks of the Rock River — a little more than an hour’s float north and east of what is now TPC Deere Run — Deere set up shop anew.

In addition to shoeing horses, Deere was a do-it-all repairman for farm settlers who had fled New England for new beginnings of their own. Many struggled with horse-drawn plows made of wood or iron that worked well in thinner soil back east but proved a mismatch for the rich clay soil of the Illinois prairie. In time, John Deere conceived and forged a steel plow capable of creating a furrow in a field while efficiently shedding the sticky Midwest mud. This allowed farmers to plow their fields without the time-consuming need to stop and clean the heavy earth off the apparatus.

It was a solution for which farmers near and far willingly would pay.

Demand grew, and by 1840, Deere listed his occupation not as blacksmith but as agricultural manufacturer, the Dahlstroms reported. An investor supplied the capital to help grow the business beyond the limited market of the Rock River Valley, but in time, Deere came to doubt his partner’s accounting practices and found himself constrained by the feeling that he again was a hired hand.

In 1848, Deere sold his interest in the Grand Detour operation and ventured a little further west to set up a manufacturing shop of his own at the place where the Mississippi River bends.

John Deere has been a constant and faithful presence in the community ever since.

Today, Deere and Company is a publicly traded Fortune 100 global enterprise, employing nearly 70,000 people in 30 countries, with more than a tenth of those employees living and working in the Quad Cities.

Four of Deere’s 15 U.S.-based factories are located in the Quad Cities. The company’s world headquarters is a four-building campus occupying 1,200 acres overlooking the same Rock River delta occupied by the second fairway at Deere Run, mere minutes to the east.

Tucked into a far southeast finger of Moline, the headquarters at One John Deere Place is home to several experimental fields for growing corn and beans, two man-made lakes, and hundreds of itinerant Canada geese. The Administrative Center’s four buildings house office space for 900, and each of their exteriors consist of CorTen oxidizing steel that rusts, then seals itself as it weathers.

That weathered look echoes the very earth that birthed the company’s foundational product, and is a look specifically chosen by William Hewitt, Deere and Company’s fifth president and chair.

Patricia (Wiman) Hewitt was a great-great-granddaughter of John Deere, and her husband, a native San Franciscan, was the last company leader with a direct family tie to the founder. It was the Hewitts who decided to keep Deere and Company anchored in the Quad Cities when its headquarters were moved in 1964 from the Mississippi River shoreline where the company patriarch planted roots.

The TaxSlayer Center sits today on the foundational piece of land where John Deere settled, on land gifted to the community by Deere and Company.

It was the commercial traffic the great river facilitated and the power supplied by a nearby dam that drew John Deere to the Moline riverbank midway through the 19^th Century. The fledgling community took its name from the French word moulin (translation: mill town) and, inevitably, factories and commerce grew around several existing mills and alongside the plow-making company originally established as Deere, Tate & Gould.

The 1856 completion of the first railroad bridge across the Mississippi connected east to west by way of what is now Arsenal Island. This added a second important mode of commercial transportation to the area. With Rock Island to the west and Davenport on the river’s opposite shore, the region came to be known as the Tri Cities, and was positioned for rapid growth when the Second Industrial Revolution dawned in the 1870s.

In addition to serving as a means to export goods to new markets, the trains brought valuable imports to the area’s increasingly busy factories: People.

European immigrants — predominantly Belgians, Swedes, and Germans — arrived by rail by the hundreds, all seeking gainful employment in a new land of plenty. Many de-trained only upon hearing the two English words family members who had arrived earlier had dispatched back home. “John Deere,” the train conductor declared, and the forebears of many of today’s legion of JDC volunteers collected their children and worldly belongings and stepped off the train into their new lives.

By 1860, some 30 manufacturers had set up shop in the Tri Cities, and a January 1882 “A Year’s Review” section of The Moline Review-Dispatch reported Moline was itself a city pushing a population of nearly 12,000, with no fewer than 18 large manufacturing plants within its borders.

A front-page article in the section described what by then had been rechristened Deere and Company as “one of the famous industrial institutions of the country and the world.”

That headline could be found next to an article describing Moline as “one of the quietest, most orderly towns in America,” and which further stated: “There are no idle hands here, everything is busy and too prosperous to turn to mischief. The ground fairly throbs under the vast machinery and boundless industry that rumble and roll unceasingly.”

Much of that boundless, rumbling, rolling industry was farm-related, and two start-up manufacturing groups would grow into Deere and Company competitors and large Quad Cities employers through the next century.

Buford and Tate opened in the mid-1850s, shortly after Robert Tate — who had followed John Deere to Moline from Grand Detour — opted to leave the partnership that was Deere, Tate, and Gould. Although Tate remained close friends with John Deere for the rest of their lives, he and his new partners built a successful implement manufacturing business of their own. That business became Rock Island Plow Company in 1885, expanded into the tractor market in 1914, and was purchased by the J.I. Case Company of Racine, Wisconsin, in 1937.

Case would eventually open manufacturing plants in Rock Island, East Moline, and Bettendorf.

The Moline Plow Company emerged in 1871 from a lengthy court fight between Deere and Company and another Moline manufacturer originally called Candee, Swan, and Co.

According to Wayne G. Broehl, Jr., author of the exhaustive history, “John Deere’s Company: A History of Deere and Company and its Times,” the crux of contention was that Candee, Swan and Co. was marketing its main product as a Moline plow. “In Charles Deere’s mind — and especially in the minds of his customers — his firm made the Moline plow,” Broehl wrote.

This was the focus of the trademark infringement lawsuit Deere and Company lawyers filed in the spring of 1869: Did Deere have a first-dibs, proprietary claim to the hometown’s name? A district court ruled in Deere’s favor in November 1869, but the victory was fleeting. In 1871, the hard-won district decision was vacated on appeal by the Illinois Supreme Court, and the competitor officially assumed the Moline Plow Company name.

In 1915, the Moline Plow Company purchased the Universal Tractor Company of Columbus, Ohio, a decision whose lasting claim to fame resides today in the back pages of the Chicago Bears media guide. (The Universal Tractors, remember, were George Halas’ first victims.) The company ceased tractor production in 1925, and a year later, its Rock Island tractor plant was purchased by International Harvester. IH produced tractors there through 1985 under the Farmall brand.

Industry thrived in the region through the turn of the 19^th Century, when what was by then being referred to as the Quad Cities briefly competed with Detroit for an additional moniker: Motor City. No fewer than six companies built motorized vehicles along the river, two with Deere family affiliations. The Velie Motors Corp., founded by John Deere’s grandson Willard Velie, made various models from 1908 through 1928. Charles Deere himself was a partner in the Deere-Clark Motor Car Co.

The latter enterprise ceased production in 1907 when Charles — the son whose foresight and business acumen helped his father’s plow company grow into one of the most successful manufacturing businesses in the country — died at the age of 70.

John Deere had passed away 21 years before at the age of 82, having lived a full and productive life. As detailed by the Dahlstroms, Deere in retirement took a strong abolitionist stand in the build-up to the War Between the States; financially supported local schools, churches and colleges; and was a trustee and deacon of the First Congregational Church, a co-founder of the First National Bank, and a trustee of Charles’ alma mater, Knox College in Galesburg.

Following Moline’s incorporation as a city, John Deere served as the city’s second mayor from 1873 through 1875. In that brief span, he directed the creation of a full-time fire department; led the installation of street lights and numerous infrastructure improvements; deftly brokered a compromise between temperance advocates and their thirsty foes; and oversaw the expansion of Riverside Cemetery onto the hillside above what is now Riverside Park.

In that scenic hillside setting, the old village smithy rests today, surrounded by family.

Through the eventful 20^th Century, the Quad Cities grew in stride with John Deere’s company.

Although the heads of every third QC household were jobless and Quad Citians sought government relief by the thousands, the area weathered the Great Depression, and Deere and Company did, too.

In “John Deere’s Company,” author Broehl cited a decline in sales from $63 million to $8.7 million between 1930 and 1932. Factory employment fell by two-thirds in a matter of a year. Layoffs and wage cuts continued for several hard years. However, Charles Deere Wiman’s foresight in creating an employee benefit savings plan during an earlier downturn helped many Deere employees get through the epic struggle better than most Americans.

The founder’s great-grandson and the company’s fourth president, Wiman also helped farmers through the Great Depression, at least those who were not among the hundreds of thousands who lost their farmsteads. Deere and Company generously held the loans of many farmers unable to pay for recently purchased equipment until the economy recovered. “This belief in the farmers’ integrity succeeded in heightening an already fabled farmer loyalty to Deere,” Broehl wrote.

By 1936, Deere and Company’s sales were back on the rise. Soon after, the American farmer’s brand loyalty — coupled with Wiman’s commitment to research and development even during the Depression — had a Poppin’ Johnnie, Deere’s highly dependable two-cylinder tractor, parked in a preponderance of barns across the American countryside.

Jobs were plentiful in the Quad Cities a decade later, when members of the Greatest Generation came home from the battlefields of Europe and the South Pacific. By July 1948, the bi-state region boasted more than 46,000 industrial jobs in more than 300 plants, large and small, and the QCs were featured in a 1949 edition of the national magazine Business Week under the headline “The Farm Machinery Capital of the World.”

The Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) opened a sprawling plant east of Bettendorf in 1948. Caterpillar opened the world’s largest manufacturing site for loaders and graders in north Davenport in 1967. Deere expanded its north Davenport plant to build heavy construction equipment a few years before that, and in 1968 opened an all-electric, smokeless foundry in Silvis that instantly was hailed as a technological marvel and one of the 10 best industrial plants in the country.

By the fall of 1974, four years after the debut of the Quad Cities Open, the New York Times described the QCs as “an interlocking sprawl of 372,000 people.” That same story discussed record production levels for Deere, IH, and Case, and noted there were 8,000 jobs at the Rock Island Arsenal’s Army Sustainment Command Center — all of this while Americans elsewhere waited in gas lines and braced for a recession.

By 1979, when a young D.A. Weibring won the last of the Ed McMahon QCOs, the Quad Cities area boasted 52,000 industrial jobs, and UAW members were leaving Detroit for the Quad Cities, trading high-paying work assembling cars for high-paying jobs assembling tractors.

And then, almost suddenly, the unceasing rumble and roll of boundless industry all but stopped.

The crisis that reshaped farming and the farm implement industry in America in the late 1970s devastated the Quad Cities in the 1980s. Headlines of plant closings and job losses were a constant over a span of three years.

Farmall, that Rock Island descendant of Buford and Tate, fell first, taking its last 1,200 jobs with it in 1985.

J.I. Case shuttered its plants in Bettendorf and Rock Island in 1987 and 1988, respectively, eliminating 1,140 remaining jobs between them. Also, in 1988, Caterpillar closed its barely two-decades-old Davenport plant, putting 1,350 Quad Citians out of work.

The final domino did not fall until 2004 when CNH Global sent the last 600 workers home from the East Moline factory that was built by International Harvester in 1929. That factory had housed 4,200 workers at its peak production.

Deere and Company was not immune to the rumbles that shook the industry. That state-of-the-industry smokeless Silvis foundry closed just a quarter of a century after its celebrated debut. Of the 575 employees left at the plant in 1993, some accepted early retirement or transferred to the Deere foundry in Waterloo, Iowa. Others accepted a company offer of training for a head start on a new career.

Deere plants elsewhere in the community also experienced layoffs, but something Quad Citians should never take for granted is this: Deere is still here.

Indeed, while the presence of IH, Case, and Caterpillar in the Quad Cities is an increasingly distant memory, John Deere’s company remains the Quad Cities’ largest employer by far, with close to 8,000 mostly native workers and 10,000 or more retirees living here.

As detailed by Broehl, Deere and Company’s staying power is owed to savvy business foresight that began in the late 1800s when Charles Deere took the initial steps toward making the company a global exporter. And it continued through the dawn of those difficult 1980s as the Hewitt-led Deere and Company became a global presence.

Within a year of Hewitt’s appointment as president in 1955, the company was well on its way to having plants in Mexico and Germany. And by the end of his tenure in 1982, Deere and Company had a presence in Argentina, Venezuela, France, Spain, Great Britain and Western Europe, Australia, Japan, South Africa, China, and the Middle East.

Hewitt also continued a pattern of product expansion and diversification that began with Charles Deere. Under Hewitt’s watch, Deere and Company introduced a heavy equipment division and a consumer product division that included lawn and garden tractors, as well as insurance and financial services divisions.

That push toward new product lines has continued under a new succession of leaders with no familial ties to the company founder, including, fortuitously, a growing presence in the golf and sports turf equipment market.

Ably led by Robert Hanson, Hans Becherer, Bob Lane, Sam Allen, and recently appointed CEO and President John May, Deere and Company has also continued to grow its worldwide footprint and build upon its widely respected brand.

This, Deere has done even while remaining in and, most importantly, of the Quad Cities, a place whose communal character — marked by equal strains of epic determination, boundless belief, and blue-collar work ethic — the old village smithy and his steel plow foundationally helped to forge.

(This content, first published in 2021, is shared with the permission of the Quad City Golf Classic Charitable Foundation. Please consider a donation to Birdies for Charity.)