I ran across a feel good story on Facebook, posted by J Mendoza, Jr, that’s too good not to share. Here are some snippets:
He was a bankrupt blacksmith with five children to feed. He grabbed a broken piece of steel and built a $100 billion empire that’s still running 187 years later.
In 1837, John Deere was drowning.
Not in water—in debt. He was 33 years old, running a failing blacksmith shop in Rutland, Vermont, with five hungry children at home and creditors pounding on his door.
Vermont’s economy had collapsed. Work had dried up. The future looked bleaker every single day.
…
He abandoned Vermont and headed west to the wild American frontier. His destination: Grand Detour, Illinois—a tiny settlement of barely 100 people where land was cheap, settlers were flooding in, and a skilled blacksmith might actually have a chance...When John Deere arrived in Illinois in 1837, he discovered something strange. The Midwest had a problem nobody could solve.
Beneath the endless prairie grass lay the richest, most fertile soil in North America. Dark, thick, packed with nutrients. It should have been a farmer’s paradise. Instead, it was their nightmare.
The prairie soil was completely different from the sandy earth back East. It was heavy, sticky, dense—like wet concrete. When farmers tried to plow it with traditional cast iron plows, the mud clung to the blade in thick clumps. Every few feet, farmers had to stop and scrape the mud off manually. The iron plows would crack and break under the strain. Hours of backbreaking work barely produced a single furrow.
America’s best farmland was almost impossible to farm.
…
In 1837, [John Deere] found a broken steel sawmill blade. He heated it in his forge until it glowed orange, then hammered it into the curved shape of a plow. He polished it until it gleamed like a mirror. He attached it to a wooden frame.
(Picture from the John Deere website – it looks like their museum.)
Then he handed it to a local farmer and said: “Try this.”
The farmer pushed the plow into the prairie soil.
It sliced through like a hot knife through butter.
The sticky, stubborn earth that had defeated every cast iron plow simply slid off the polished steel surface. No scraping. No stopping. No breaking.
The plow was self-cleaning. Revolutionary. Perfect.
Word spread across the prairie like wildfire.
Farmers traveled for miles just to see this miraculous plow. They came with cash in hand, desperate to buy one. John Deere’s tiny blacksmith shop was suddenly the most important business in Illinois.
He sold 3 plows in 1838. Then 10. Then 40. Then 100 a year. Then 1,000. By 1857, he was producing 10,000 plows annually.
…
The steel plow didn’t just help individual farmers. It unlocked an entire continent.
It made the Great Plains farmable. It enabled westward expansion. It turned subsistence farmers into commercial producers. It helped transform America from a nation that struggled to feed itself into an agricultural superpower that would eventually feed the world.
Historians rank the steel plow alongside the cotton gin and the mechanical reaper as one of the most transformative inventions of the 19th century.
I recommend the article to you in its entirety. It’s a reminder that one person can make a difference. One starving, bankrupt blacksmith in Vermont. Two bicycle mechanics from Ohio.
On a side note, the mayor-elect of New York City declared in his victory speech:
We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about. – Reported by Peggy Noonan, November 6, 2025
Exactly the opposite is true. Government didn’t invent the airplane, the Wright Brothers did. Government didn’t solve the problem of tilling the soil in the Midwest, John Deere did.
God is the great Creator, and he allows us to be his fellow-workers, his fellow-creators.
The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. (Genesis 2.15, NIV)
Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron. (Genesis 4.22, NIV)