The Book that Built the John Deere Archive
By Lee Klancher and Leslie J. Stegh
From the book, John Deere's Company by Wayne Broehl Jr.
The book, John Deere's Company is the most thorough work covering the evolution of Deere & Co. The two-volume set that comprises John Deere’s Company chronicles the history of the company from the plow to their role as a global leader. It also offers tremendous insight into the history of the entire agricultural equipment industry, and is arguably the most comprehensive history of agricultural equipment history in print as of 2022. The book’s depth and breadth emerged from nearly a decade of work by author Wayne G. Broehl Jr., a scholar, historian, and author who labored on the book from 1977 to 1984, working full time on the work for roughly half of that time period.
Broehl’s work was funded by Deere & Co., an arrangement that came to be because of a connection Broehl made with William Hewitt, who was Deere & Co.’s president from 1955 to 1964 and chairman from 1965 to 1982. The worldly and ambitious Hewitt was one of Deere’s finest leaders, spearheading the creation of the New Generation series, leading the charge to topple International Harvester from the lead in agricultural equipment in 1963, expanding Deere’s overseas presence dramatically, and then solidifying its number one position into the 1980s with aggressive research and development budgets backed with a much-needed revitalization of the Deere sales efforts.
The Hewitt to Broehl connection likely occurred at Dartmouth College, where Broehl was a professor in the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration and had written several authoritative histories, including The Molly Maguires, which was made into a major motion picture starring Sean Connery.
Broehl offered executive training at Dartmouth, and it’s possible Hewitt attended one of these sessions. Hewitt’s daughter, Adrienne (1955–2004), graduated from Dartmouth in 1977, meaning she would have been at the school about the time Broehl and Hewitt connected. It’s possible the connection came because of Adrienne as well.
Hewitt was an avid supporter of the arts and filled the hallways of Deere with pieces from some of the finest artists of the time. One of the most spectacular examples is the 180-foot-long multimedia timeline of biographical, industrial, and agricultural artifacts that was accumulated and arranged by artist, designer, and collector Alexandar Girard. Famous for his work designing fabrics and furniture for influential design firm Herman Miller, Girard also pioneered colorful liveries on airplanes with Braniff Airways, designed interiors for well-known restaurants in New York, and amassed a substantial collection of folk art.
In 1963, Hewitt commissioned Girard to assemble the mural for Deere’s new corporate headquarters and was actively involved in the project, even suggesting Girard rent a warehouse near his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to store objects considered for the project. Girard and his wife crisscrossed the United States to purchase items from secondhand stores and flea markets as well, looking to use them as a physical representation of Deere’s rural roots and modern expansion. The massive mural Girard made for John Deere was well received by art critics of the time and was on display at the John Deere Pavilion in Moline, Illinois, prior to 2020.
In addition to his love for art, Hewill also clearly appreciated history and writing. When Hewitt and Broehl met in the mid-1970s, Broehl was given almost a blank check to research and write an authoritative history of John Deere.
In fact, the Deere & Company Archives was created because of their partnership. Like most corporations, Deere’s archives prior to the book consisted mainly of a basement storage space stuffed with loosely organized boxes of material. Deere hired an archivist to organize and sift through Deere’s records and prepare the materials needed for author Wayne Broehl Jr. to write John Deere’s Company.
When Leslie J. Stegh came into the picture, he was working as an archivist at Kent State in Ohio shortly after completing his advanced education—at Ohio (MA 1967) and Kansas State University (BS 1966, PhD 1975). He saw the Deere job advertisement for the archivist position and immediately applied. After a series of interviews in Moline, Stegh was one of several candidates who were booked commercial flights to travel to meet Broehl at his home in Hanover, New Hampshire.
“I had to go to Hanover to be interviewed by Wayne, because they wanted somebody in the archives who would get along well with Wayne,” Stegh said. “I flew out to Boston in a real plane, and then from Boston to Hanover in some dinky little thing. I remember leaving Hanover when the pilot of this dinky little plane hollered out, ‘Is anybody hot back there?’ and somebody said, ‘Yes,’ and the guy opened the front window of the plane.”
Stegh doesn’t remember many details about his meeting with Broehl, although he does recall being recruited to help with automotive repair. “We went to his house. He needed somebody to drive his extra car over to Vermont to get service, and so I drove his extra car over there.”
“We had a pleasant time.”
Broehl clearly enjoyed the meeting as well—or at least approved—as Stegh was hired to the newly created position as John Deere Archivist.
In addition to hiring Stegh to oversee the organization of its archives, Deere committed to replace the traditional card catalog with a digital search system hosted on a computer—a radical innovation at the time. They also recruited another staff member, Vicki Eller, to help organize the archives. Eller had a degree in organizational communications. She started with John Deere in 1975 and still works there as of June 2022.
Working with Broehl proved to be one of the best facets of Stegh’s new job. “He was a great guy. He had such a great personality,” Stegh said. He added that despite his long list of accomplishments, Broehl remained accessible. “He is from Peoria, but he made good in academia in a way only a few people would ever dream of . . . He did stuff with The Rockefeller Foundation. His book on the Molly Maguires became a movie with Sean Connery.”
“The guy was just incredibly pleasant. He would come over to our house for dinner with Jean, his wife, and we'd sit and drink beer and talk about all kinds of stuff, but he just had this knack of being successful in academia. He just amazed me. I just admired him so much.”
The work of creating the book stretched out over seven years, beginning in 1977. Deere was incredibly supportive of Broehl’s work. The company hired a research assistant for him in Hanover and rented an apartment for him in Moline. Stegh recalled that Broehl would spend roughly half of each year in the apartment in Moline, working on the Deere book. “He [also] traveled around with Bill Hewitt to China, and to Russia, to Australia.”
In addition to support, Deere gave Broehl the freedom to do with the book as he saw fit.
“The company gave him freedom to do whatever writing, whatever he wanted. People at the time outside the company who knew about what he was doing, they would say, ‘Well, he's writing a business history and it's going to be all roses and all the good stuff about the company,’ but it wasn't.”
“I never heard anybody at Deere say, ‘Well, we put our foot down on this,’ and part of it was that, for the most part, the company always did the right thing . . . [It] were investigated by the FTC and all these other people from monopolies and things, and [it] seemed to have always done the right thing, and so that made it pretty easy for him that he didn't have to worry about how he was going to approach some certain controversial thing.”
Stegh said Broehl saw the work as a tremendous opportunity and had high expectations for the work.
“He wanted to win a Pulitzer Prize. That was his hope that this book would be his Pulitzer Prize–winning book. The guy had written all kinds of other stuff, critically acclaimed in the history and business world, but he wanted a Pulitzer Prize,” Stegh said. “He knew this guy, Chandler, the guy who wrote The Visible Hand, he knew that Chandler won a Pulitzer Prize just recently. He knew it could happen and he really wanted it.”
As Broehl’s book developed, one of the biggest challenges was length. While the published book is massive, Broehl had material to fill more. “Part of the discussion became, ‘Is it going to be one or two volumes?’ Because it was just whacked to shit, to get it down to a reasonable one volume size. I mean, it was at least twice as long to start with. As he would write a chapter, he would dictate this stuff onto a tape, and then Anne, one of the women in the archives, would transcribe it. She'd sit there with earphones, like you, and she transcribed this thing. Then he'd look at it, and then he'd give it to me, and I'd sit over at my office. I had an office, and his office was next to mine, and we had a glass wall behind it between us. I'd sit there and I'd read this stuff.”
“The book would've been twice as long. It was sent off to be reviewed. I would comment on it and people at Deere would comment on it, and it would get whacked and whacked, and then it got sent off to somebody, I think, in Arizona where the final whacking got done, but it would've been a lot bigger.”
The original edition was a voluminous 870 pages with more than 400,000 words. For the reprint in your hands, the publisher chose to break this beast of a book into two volumes to allow for adding images, properly formatting the material, and keeping the retail cost more accessible.
One of the issues Stegh dealt with was Broehl’s extensive command of the English language—specifically obscure words. “I remember the only real comment I ever made was, ‘Goddamn it, Wayne. I have a PhD and I'm sitting here with a dictionary trying to understand what it is you're writing because you had a vocabulary that just wouldn't quit!’”
“That was the main criticism I ever made of was that the vocabulary was way above the average PhD's level of reading.”
Selecting the publisher was another big process. As Stegh recalls, the book was shopped around to a variety of presses before they settled on Doubleday.
“All I knew was that they were looking to find somebody to do it. [Broehl] wanted it done by a big publisher. This was his big work up till that time.”
In an unusual twist, Stegh recalls that a John Deere employee ended up creating and assembling the book’s page design. Stegh speculated that perhaps this was because Deere wanted control of the look, or perhaps even that it simply wanted to participate in the creation of the product.
“That's all I can figure, because they just took this guy out of the advertising art design department and said, ‘Here, Burkhart, you're in charge of laying this thing out.’”
Wayne Burkhart was his name, and, in an arrangement best characterized as unusual, the layout of a book produced by one of the world’s largest publishers was designed by a John Deere ad designer.
The cover art on the original edition also had interesting origins. The painting is done by well-known American artist Grant Wood, and is entitled, “Fall Plowing.” As stated previously, Hewitt was an art fan, and, under his tenure, Deere amassed a significant collection of works. “Fall Plowing” was one of those and was selected to be on the cover of the Doubleday edition of Broehl’s book.
The book was published in 1984. The first printing sold out, and a second was issued—indicating that the book was successful on the sales front.
Stegh noted the first edition had a fair amount of minor editorial errors, and even recalls one Deere employee who made a point of coming into his office to point out typos.
“Anyways, he's the only person, as far as I know, that did that.”
While sales of the book were solid, Stegh recalls the collector community was not entirely satisfied with the work’s focus on business rather than nuts and bolts. And the timing was a bit off as well—Deere’s 150th anniversary was in 1987, three years after the book came out.
That anniversary was also not celebrated in the grand fashion one might expect. In the mid-1980s, the entire country was in trouble, with the agricultural world in the worst situation since the Great Depression, and Deere didn’t have a lot of bandwidth to make a big splash out of its 150th anniversary.
While Deere was fighting to survive, several other writers—Don Macmillan and Jack Cherry, most notably—created works that were targeted at enthusiasts. Macmillan wrote several in-depth books focused on the history of the equipment, and Cherry worked with the archives to build the empire that is Two-Cylinder Magazine.
Both did great things for the tractor world, and they certainly delivered the detail that collectors crave. Even so, no other written work remotely compares in depth and breadth to Broehl’s historical account of how the John Deere company formed and grew.
The archives survived life after Broehl as well. Despite the hard times, Stegh and his team were able to find ways to stay relevant and funded. The Deere & Company Archives helped countless authors create books and articles in the 1980s and 1990s and, in partnership with Two-Cylinder Magazine, provided detailed serial number records on individual tractors to collectors.
Stegh has fond memories of the time he spent working with Broehl.
“He would come, and he would stay for a few months at a time. He had an office next to mine, and he'd walk in in the morning. He'd say, ‘Good morning, Dr. Les,’ and I would say, ‘Good morning, Dr. Wayne,’ and then we would go about our business, but then at lunchtime, there would always be a heated game of hearts. We would sit in the back, and we would play hearts. The ladies, there was Vicki, and Anne, and Nancy, and me, and then Wayne, and we'd play hearts. It would be cutthroat hearts games.”
Stegh added that Betty Denkhoff, Hewitt’s long-time executive administrative assistant would join as well. “Here [was] this very distinguished matronly lady who would come down, and she’d sit there and she’d play hearts with us, and Wayne would play hearts, and we would just banter back and forth.”
“We’d have a great time. Then one time, and you can find this picture in the archives, I’m sure, we talked Wayne into putting on John Deere’s bathing suit. The suit is in the archives—unless the moths have eaten it completely. There was what was reportedly to be John Deere’s bathing suit, this black wool kind of a pull on, kind of a onesie like you put on a baby. So, we got Wayne to put this thing out and we had a Polaroid camera, and we got [a] really cool picture of him pos[ing] in a muscular beach fashion kind of thing, so that was fun.”
“He was the kind of guy who would hobnob with the Rockefellers, but if you were in a right environment, you could get him to dress up in John Deere’s bathing suit.”
“I could sit and reminisce for days. . . you sent me down memory lane. But it’s just that he was bound [and] determine[d] to write a good book, and he did, and I think he was very happy with it, but he was also the kind of guy who just wouldn’t stop. He finished that book, and right away, he is off to Cargill doing [an]other damn book. And he was getting up in years, and died doing the Cargill books, but he was just an exceptional person.”
“We all admired him, and everybody liked him. There wasn’t anybody, I think, that didn’t like him.”
Leslie J. Stegh was the archivist for John Deere from 1977 to 2001. He spent nearly a decade working closely with author Wayne Broehl Jr. to create John Deere’s Company. Much of this piece was compiled from an interview with Stegh on February 22, 2022.
Lee Klancher is the author of several award-winning books chronicling the history of agricultural equipment, including John Deere Evolution and the Red Tractors series of books.
