Along the way, we passed the home of Mike Emmons in Ashton, Ill. Mike
(the fellow on the ladder) has been at this only three years, but his gardens
look as if they've been tended since the house was built in 1850. After
three days of haze and grey sky, the color is a welcome sight, and a chance
to test out the color capabilities of the DC 50 camera.
Then it was on to Grand Detour (pronounced as in the French "de tour"), the site of the John Deere blacksmith shop and national landmark. Deere was a young blacksmith in Vermont in the 1830's when he heard about the opportunities in the west. Leaving his wife and kids in Vermont, he came to Grand Detour and set up shop. At that time, the land was tall prairie grass. Farmers would clear the land by burning the grass, then turning the soil with wooden or cast iron plows pulled by horse or oxen. When Deere arrived, the plows that worked so well in the East were proving to be useless at "sod busting" in the midwest. The thick, rootbound soil of the prairie grass would cling to plow face, and needed to be scraped off every few minutes.
Deere had the idea of using steel, imported from England, as the plow
blade, replacing the coarse cast iron. The steel face of the Deere plow
could be polished to a smooth, glossy surface that the prairie sod would
not cling to. Deere and his "prairie breaker" steel plow became an overnight
sensation, and he was able to bring his family west. Within a year or two,
his blacksmith shop turned into a plow factory. By the 1840's he had moved
to a larger factory 80 miles down river to Moline, Illinois, on the Mississippi
River, where Deere headquarters is today.
No visit to Moline is complete without a visit to the wonderful corporate
headquarters of John Deere & Co. Built in 1964, today it offers the
visitor two special features -- beautiful grounds with hiking paths, and
the ultimate big-boy-toy show room, where us desk bound folk can climb
into the cab of a $200,000 combine and dream.
We settle in for the night at the Fulton Guesthouse bed and breakfast
in Davenport, Iowa, overlooking the Mississippi. Pat and Bill Schmidt welcome
us to their lovingly restored mansion.
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