Back on the Great River Road: First Stop, the John Deere Historic Site
My Own True Love and I are back on the Great River Road!
For those of you who are new to the Margins: In November, 2015, My Own True Love and I set out on an adventure. We headed south for a three-week trip along the Great River Road, a conglomeration of 3000 miles of local and state roads that follow the length of the Mississippi River. We started in Memphis, went south until we reached the end of the road in Louisiana, then headed back toward Chicago, stopping at whatever took our fancy. We thought we would make it all in one trip (pause for manic laughter), but our fancy led us to make lots of stops. We only got as far as Vicksburg on the way back.
Depending on how you count, we’re starting our fourth or fifth stint on the Great River Road, beginning at the Quad Cities, and are excited to be back on the trail. As always, I’ll post stories here on the Margins about the stuff we see.*
First up, the John Deere Historic Site in Grand Detour, Illinois—aptly named in our case since we stopped there on our way to the Mississippi.
Is it my imagination, or do all these old guys start to look alike after awhile?
For those of you who don’t know, John Deere was the innovator who made the first commercially successful plow, one adapted to cut through prairie soil and thus critical to America’s westward expansion. **
Before Deere, most plows were made of cast iron. These were more than adequate for the light soil of the eastern United States but did not work well in the stickier soil of the prairie and could not cope with the thick roots of prairie grass. Even when a farmer could cut through the the grass, he had to stop every few yards to clean off the soil that clumped off his blade.
Early John Deere plow, made in Grand Detour. Displayed at the Henry Ford Museum.
Deere was a Vermont blacksmith who moved west in search of opportunity. In 1836, soon after he moved to the new town of Grand Detour, Deere designed a steel blade that was “self-scouring” in response to complaints by the local farmers about the difficulty of working the prairie soil. (Repairing their broken plows made up a large part of his business.) The first year he made one of the new plows. The next year he made two. Then 40. Then 400. Ten years after he had made the first plow he was so successful that he moved the company to Moline, on the Mississippi because he needed access to better transportation—not only to ship plows out, but to ship materials in. In the early days he had to get his steel from England. (A story for another day.)
The John Deere Historic Site is located on the land where Deere lived and worked in Grand Detour. It includes the actual Deere house as it existed before the family moved to Moline, an enclosed archeological dig of his blacksmith shop with attached exhibits and a brief film, and a working blacksmith shop built to the dimensions rediscovered in the dig. Tours of the site begin whenever there are guests. (Touring the site without a guide is not an option. Tough on those of us who like to pause and think about the exhibits.) The Deere story is told with a slightly different emphasis at each of the three stops. In addition to being interested by the story, I was fascinated by the fact that the tour guides consistently “first-named” Deere and his wife—something I haven’t seen at other historical sites. It gave feeling of intimacy, as if the Deere family were their neighbors. As I suppose they were in some ways.***
The blacksmith shop was the high point of the visit, which is entirely appropriate given that the story of the Deere plow begins in his blacksmith shop. I’ve seen many blacksmiths give demonstrations of their craft/art/science but it never fails to enthrall me. There is something truly magical about the process. The blacksmith on duty during our visit to the John Deere site, named Lloyd, was one of the best I’ve seen, not simply because of his considerable skill with the metal but because of the breadth of knowledge about steel, implements, and smithing.
In short, the John Deere Historic Site is well worth a stop if you’re near Dixon, Illinois (the biggest town near Grand Detour).
*If you want to read about our earlier trips, search by Great River Road, or check in the category Road Trip Through History.
**My Own True Love is originally from South Bend, home to the Oliver Chilled Plow, which also claims to have helped “tame the prairie.” He wanted to know how the Oliver plow related to the Deere plow. The docents he asked did not know—not surprising since we were at the John Deer Historic Site, maintained by the John Deere Foundation. So I took a little dive down a very small rabbit hole once we got back to the hotel room. (And why not, I ask you?) The Oliver plow was made of chilled cast iron, using a process developed in 1869 and patented in 1873. It was cheap, durable, and well-designed to use in any type of soil. It, too was a smash hit with farmers. In fact, for a time the Oliver Chilled Plow Works was the largest plow manufacturer in the world, with the trademark “Plowmakers for the World.”
***This might not have caught my attention at another time, but I am currently struggling with the question of whether to call a historical figure by her first name. It is a fraught question, particularly when you are writing about a woman. I spent some thinking about this question in my newsletter, back in December 2020. I’m not sure I have progressed in my thinking since then.
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Travel Tips:
1. Dixon is home to Ronald Reagan’s boyhood home, as opposed to his birthplace which is further down the road. We decided we weren’t prepared to take an hour-long tour of a house only a little bigger than the one I grew up in. You might decide differently.
2. There is another, much larger, John Deere museum in Moline, Illinois. It is well worth a visit if you’re interested in agricultural history or big machinery. (I’m not being sarcastic. We spent several hours there on a previous trip to the Quad Cities, long before I started this blog. It was fascinating.)
Poland’s “May Coup”–1926
These days I am deep in the history of the years between the two world wars. Some of it was familiar at the point that I began, at least in broad outlines. But the fact of the matter is that a whole lot of history happened across Europe in those twenty-one years that never popped up in my historical studies, formal or otherwise.* Some of those stories are inherently small. (*Coughs: Free State of Fiume. *) Others, like the story I’m going to share today, are not so small. I’ll share as many of them as I can here over the coming months. Taken as a whole they create a much richer picture of just how unsettled Europe was between 1918 and 1939. **
Let’s go:
At the end of World War I, the Republic of Poland was established as an independent country after more than a century of being divided at various times and various ways between France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, and the Russian Empire. Independence was not all beer and sausages. Under the leadership of nationalist hero Jozef Pilsudski,*** the new country was faced with a ravaged economy, extensive war damage, border conflicts with the Russian Red Army and a political blank slate.
In 1921, Poland adopted a constitution modeled on that of the French Third Republic, with a president and a two house legislature. Like its contemporary, the new Weimar Republic, the Republic of Poland was unstable, with supporters of a democratic republic challenged by the nationalist and antisemitic National Democracy party. The country’s first president was assassinated by a supporter of the National Democracy party only five days after taking office. Pilsudski helped stablise the country through a second set of elections, and then retired from active politics. What he did behind the scenes was another story.
By 1925, public unrest was increasing thanks to the government’s inability to solve problems of hyperinflation and mounting unemployment. At the same time, some terms of the recently signed Locarno Treaties appeared to threaten Poland’s independence, or at least leave it without allies in the face of potential German aggression. Pilsudski became increasingly critical of the elected government and eventually issued statements demanding the elected cabinet’s resignation.
On May 12, 1926, Pilsudski marched on Warsaw at the head of several units of the Polish army. His forces captured bridges over the Vistula River, effectively isolating the city, and demanded the resignation of the cabinet. After three days of urban fighting, the president and prime minister resigned in order to keep the coup from escalating into a full-scale civil war. A new government was formed in early June, with two of Pulsudski’s cronies as president and prime minister. Pilsudski refused to form a government in his own name, taking the position of minister of defense instead. In fact, he was the most influential politician in Poland until his death in 1935 and did his best to protect his country against a German invasion.
There are echoes in this story of things that were happening in Germany, in Italy, in Fiume. No wonder Sigrid Schultz and her comrades regularly reported that there were rumors that war was in the air.
*While there are plenty of holes in my historical education that I find shocking, that’s not what I’m talking about here. The simple fact is that the more you learn about history, (or anything else for that matter), the more you realize you don’t know.
**There will still be holes, because that is the nature of the beast.
***There should be several diacritical markers in his name, but the last time I tried to be correct about Slavic language markers the software that sends blog posts to email subscribers went on strike.****
****You didn’t know you could subscribe? There are subscription blocks for both this blog and my bi-weekly newsletter at the top of the sidebar if you read this on a computer. I haven’t figured out to make them work on a telephone yet.
Women in the Soviet Army in World War II? Let Me Count the Ways
Recently a fascinating story about a real life woman warrior appeared in the Wall Street Journal. To summarize the story: Ukranian-born Olha Tverdokhlibova fought against the Germans in World War Two. She was a skilled markswoman, served as a scout behind German lines, fought her way to Berlin with the Red Army, and was highly decorated for her service, When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, she called the Ukrainian recruiting office and offered her sharpshooting skills. To quote the WSJ article: The recruiter sounded enthusiastic, Ms. Tverdokhlibova recalled, until she revealed her age: 98.” It’s worth tracking down the article if you want more details about her story, and about her response to the Russian invasion.*
Lyudmilla Pavlichenko was one of the most successful snipers in World War II, with 309 confirmed kills. (Almost 50 percent more than the acclaimed Audie Murphy.)
Tverdokhlibova was one of 800,000 women who served as soldiers in the Red Army in the Second World War. Most, like enlisted women in the United States or Britain, worked in support positions, but several hundred thousand fought at the front as snipers, machine gunners, tank crews, antiaircraft personnel,** and three regiments of female bombers, fighter pilots, and airplane mechanics. Between 100,000 and 150,000 Soviet women were decorated for bravery during the war. Ninety-one women were awarded the Gold Star Hero of the Soviet Union, their nation’s highest military honor. *** More than half of them received the honor posthumously.
* James Marson. “Red Army Veteran Turns Against Putin.” May 10, 2022. P. A7. The WSJ has a serious paywall, so this link will only help if you have a subscription, or access to one: https://www.wsj.com/articles/she-was-a-soldier-in-the-red-army-now-shes-a-torch-bearer-for-ukraine-11652119269 (It’s worth clicking the link even without a subscription, just to see her picture.) My personal access to the paper comes through the My Own True Love Clipping Service, a very efficient operation that delivers articles of interest to my place at the dining room table.
**One German pilot testified to the effectiveness of women in Russian antiaircraft units: “I would rather fly ten times over the skies of Tobruk [over all male British ack-ack] than to pass once through [Russia where] the fire of Russian flak [was] sent up by female gunners.”
***In a breathtakingly explicit act of erasing women from history, after the war the Soviet government instructed its squadrons of female fighter pilots not to speak of their wartime experiences.