John Deere was a blacksmith

One of the interesting facts about John Deere is that John Deere was a blacksmith. John Deere settled in Grand Detour, Illinois. Due to a scarcity of blacksmiths in the area at the time, Deere had no trouble getting work. Deere, an established blacksmith, erected a 1,378-square-foot (128 m2) shop in Grand Detour in 1837, allowing him to function as a general repairman as well as a manufacturer of tools such as pitchforks and shovels in the village. The self-scouring steel plow, which was pioneered in 1837 when John Deere fashioned a Scottish steel saw blade into a plow, was just the beginning. Prior to Deere's steel plow, most farmers used iron or wooden plows that became clogged with the rich Midwestern soil and had to be cleaned on a regular basis. Deere discovered that cast-iron plows were not performing well in the harsh prairie soil of Illinois and remembered the needles he had polished as a child at his father's tailor shop in Rutland, Vermont.

Deere concluded that a plow constructed of highly polished steel and a properly formed moldboard (the self-scouring steel plow) would be better suited to the prairie's soil characteristics, particularly its sticky clay. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the smooth-sided steel plow remedied this difficulty and considerably aided migration into the American Great Plains.