Contributions from
The Museum of History and Technology:
Paper 2
John Deere's Steel Plow
Edward C. Kendall
DEERE AND ANDRUS 17
THE FIRST PLOW 19
STEEL OR IRON 21
WHY A STEEL PLOW 23
RECONSTRUCTIONS 24
IN SUMMARY— 25
JOHN DEERE'S STEEL PLOW
John Deere in 1837 invented a plow that could be usedsuccessfully in the sticky, root-filled soil of the prairie.It was called a steel plow. Actually, it appears that only thecutting edge, the share, on the first Deere plows was steel.The moldboard was smoothly ground wrought iron.
Deere's invention succeeded because, as the durable steelshare of the plow cut through the heavy earth, the sticky soilcould find no place to cling on its polished surfaces.
Americans moving westward in the beginning of the 19th century soonencountered the prairie lands of what we now call the Middle West. Thedark fertile soils promised great rewards to the farmers settling inthese regions, but also posed certain problems. First was the breakingof the tough prairie sod. The naturalist John Muir describes theconditions facing prairie farmers when he was a boy in the early 1850'sas he tells of the use of the big prairie-breaking plows in thefollowing words:[1]
They were used only for the first ploughing, in breaking upthe wild sod woven into a tough mass, chiefly by the cord-likeroots of perennial grasses, reinforced by the tap roots of oakand hickory bushes, called "grubs," some of which were morethan a century old and four or five inches in diameter.... Ifin good trim, the plough cut through and turned over thesegrubs as if the century-old wood were soft like the flesh ofcarrots and turnips; but if not in good trim the grubspromptly tossed the plough out of the ground.
The second and greater problem was that the richer lands of the prairiebottoms, after a few years of continuous cultivation, became so stickythat they clogged the moldboards of the plows. Clogging was such afactor in prairie plowing that farmers in these regions carried a woodenpaddle solely for cleaning off the moldboard, a task which had to berepeated so frequently that it seriously interfered with plowingefficiency. It seems probable that by the 1830's blacksmiths in theprairie country were beginning to solve the problem of continuouscultivation of sticky prairie soil by nailing strips of saw steel to theface of wooden moldboard of the traditional plows. Figure 1 is aphotograph of an 18th century New England plow in the