The American Innovation $1 Coin representing Illinois recognizes the steel plow. The invention of the steel plow sparked the migration of Americans to the Midwest United States in the 1800s and the beginning of agriculture’s industrial age.
In the early 1800s, Americans moved from the eastern United States to the Midwest. The land they encountered was covered with grassland prairies that proved challenging to plow. The wooden plows that easily cut through the sandy soil of the East Coast became stuck in the dense Midwestern sod.
Blacksmith John Lane in Homer Township, Illinois came up with a solution to fashion a plow from an old sawmill blade, polished so that soil didn’t stick. After field testing, Lane’s plow went into production, first on his farm and later in Lockport, Illinois. By the 1850s, his plow was a commercial success, although Lane never patented his invention.
Lane was one of a number of competing plow-makers during this era. The steel plow was first made commercially successful in 1837 by John Deere in Grand Detour, Illinois. The John Deere plow was also originally sourced from a sawmill blade. But instead of crafting them one at a time as Lane and others did, John Deere established a process for producing plows on an industrial scale.
