John Deere Museum near Rock Falls, Illinois

If I took too long to write that last post from Springfield, Illinois, then I have taken a year longer than that to write this one about the John Deere Museum! When I visited my cousin Peggy on my Great National Retirement Tour in 2016, we stopped one day on our way to a hike at the John Deere Museum in Grand Detour, Illinois only to discover that it was closed for the season. Not to be denied an experience, we returned two years later with her husband Ralph for the tour.

The tour starts in a large building that holds the archeological dig of company artifacts on the site of what was their foundry. John Deere started out making a hand plow with his own innovation - the blade was curved to prevent moist soil from sticking to it, thus speeding up the act of plowing. We first watched a movie about John Deere and his single bottom plow technology improvement that made his company soar. He sold 40 plows the first year, 400 the second, and 4,000 the third year after he founded the company.

Here are 3 iterations of the John Deere hand plows. Notice that farmers are getting more and more interested in sitting down while they plow. Now that I am a farmer, I find this fascinating, so you will have to suffer.

The photo below on the left is a recreation of one of the blast furnace blacksmith shops where they made the self-scouring plows. Today it is a stage on which their talented blacksmith works his magic. The photo below on the right is of an 1839 painting hanging in the museum showing how faithfully they recreated the blacksmith shop. The "fireplace" is the foundry and it is stoked by a hand bellows (notice the man with one hand on his hip and the other up in the air hanging onto the very large bellow). The recreated foundry of 2018 also works with a hand bellow, which can be seen in the far left if you know what to look for.

Here is our talented blacksmith who was fabulously entertain-ing. He took out an iron rebar and asked if we could tell there was a leaf in there waiting to get out. I told him that, yes, I could hear it. He told me I was crazy - something that I totally agreed with. So as he talked he heated up the iron rebar and started hammering it with different tools which he explained as he went along. Gradually a leaf appeared bit by bit from the iron rebar. He explained that the leaf became more susceptible to breakage at the point where the stem narrows. Also, if the iron got overheated and turned the wrong color, hammering it could crack it. Nothing bad happened to my leaf under his expert handling.

And here is the copper-brushed leaf that he made just for me! Now my dilemma is what to do with it. It is so special because we watched every step of his process and every step was explained in a delightfully charming way. So, what do you think? What would you do with it if a charming and gritty blacksmith made this for you?

We also toured the Dillon mansion all decorated for Christmas, but they would not allow us to take photos. So there is nothing to see.