born Feb. 7, 1804, Rutland, Vt., U.S.
died May 17, 1886, Moline, Ill.
U.S. inventor and manufacturer of agricultural implements.
He was apprenticed to a blacksmith and later set up his own smithy and moved to Illinois. There he found, through the frequent repairs he had to make, that wood and cast-iron plows, used in the eastern U.S. from the 1820s, were unsuited to the heavy, sticky prairie soils. By 1838 he had sold three steel plows of his own design; by 1846 he had sold about 1,000, and by 1857 10,000. In 1868 Deere & Co. was incorporated, and it went on to become the largest U.S. manufacturer of farm machinery.