John Deere Exhibit Digs Up a Century of Innovation
More than 100 years ago, John Deere had a problem.
The company was a leading manufacturer of plows and other implements, but it didn’t have a tractor in its equipment line. At the time, tractors were replacing horses for field work and were sold with plows as packaged units. John Deere felt immense pressure to develop a tractor of its own to maintain the company’s market share in equipment sales.
“During those initial few years, there were a lot of companies trying to build tractors, but most of them weren’t successful,” said Neil Dahlstrom who manages John Deere’s corporate archives and history in Moline, Ill.
The company paid $2 million in 1918 to buy the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Company and its popular “Waterloo Boy” tractor. The acquisition changed the course of John Deere — and the world.
That story will soon be told in “100 Years of John Deere Tractors,” a new exhibit that digs into a century of high-tech innovation in Iowa, the state where tractors were invented. The exhibit runs July 20 through Sept. 20 at the State Historical Museum of Iowa in Des Moines.
The show includes three tractors — a 1925 Model D, 1946 Model B and 1949 Model A — along with an array of artifacts from John Deere headquarters and the historical museum, including a trove of promotional brochures and posters.
“Iowa is the birthplace of the tractor, and the №1 manufacturer of tractors in the United States is John Deere,” State Curator Leo Landis said. “Its original home is Waterloo, and its history goes back to John Deere when he was a blacksmith in Vermont.”
That now-famous blacksmith was born in 1804 and moved from Vermont to Grand Detour, Ill., in 1836. After building his home there, he perfected in 1837 what would become the first commercially successful steel plow, a break-through that put him on the cutting edge of 19th century technology. By 1841, he was manufacturing 75 to 100 plows per year.
As his company grew, he moved to Moline in 1848 to be closer to rail and water connections on the Mississippi River, where he could get supplies more easily. By 1855, his factory was selling more than 10,000 plows across the American frontier.
Deere died in 1886, but his company continued to flourish. By the time it rolled out the Waterloo Boy in 1918, it employed more than 1,000 workers who could make 25 tractors a day. Company revenues at the time totaled about $3.5 million per year.
Today, Dahlstrom marvels at the company’s early success and says its philosophy remains the same as when it produced the famous Waterloo Boy.
“The Waterloo Boy had all the qualities that we were looking for,” he said. “And a lot of what we were looking at in 1918 is still driving our business now, when you consider customer needs, quality of product, reliability, durability, input costs and more.”
In the end, Dahlstrom sees the development of the tractor and other farm equipment with a “cart-before-the-horse” sense of irony.
“We think about the tractor as a stand-alone piece of equipment, but I’m excited we put a plow with it all those years ago,” he said. “A tractor really doesn’t do much unless it’s hitched to something.”
— Jeff Morgan, Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs
