This is one of a pair of Van Brunt Grain Drills on display in front of the museum. This one is about as small a drill as one could get at the time and seeded a six foot swath with seven discs on 6 inch centers.
The museum is on Round Butte Road at the corner of 6th Avenue NW. on the west edge of the town of Ronan, MT.
During the mid-nineteenth century, there were billions of passenger pigeons in North America. In 1854, a Wayne County, New York resident wrote: “There would be days and days when the air was alive with them, hardly a break occurring in the flocks for half a day at a time. Flocks stretched as far as a person could see, one tier above another.” The birds seemed to know that anytime they saw a man in a field scattering something it meant dinner was served, and they would descend on the fields in their millions and clean up virtually every grain.
The passenger pigeon’s prime nesting area was around the Great Lakes, and the State of Wisconsin got more than their share of the birds. It stands to reason, then, that two Wisconsin men, brothers George W. and Daniel C. Van Brunt, would have been pioneers in developing a successful grain drill that would prepare a series of furrows, or trenches in the soil, drop in a measured row of seeds, and then cover those seeds with an even layer of earth, all before the birds got to them.
In 1860, George Van Brunt carved a model of a force-feed device for a seeder out of a turnip, a design that later became known as the fluted force feed which is still used on non-air grain drills today. Van Brunt and his brother, Daniel, built seven seeders in their shop in Mayville, Wisconsin that year, but moved it six miles down the road to Horicon the next year. About this time, George left the firm, but Daniel persevered, patenting several improvements to his grain drill. By the end of the War Between the States (the Civil War, to Yankees), Van Brunt was a successful firm, and by 1910, was a major supplier of grain seeding machinery in the upper Midwest and the Plains states.
This success attracted the attention of C. C. Webber, a grandson of John Deere, and manager of Deere’s Minneapolis branch house. Apparently, International Harvester Company had tried to buy the Van Brunt Manufacturing Company during IH’s flurry of acquisitions in the years after its formation in 1902. Daniel Van Brunt had died in 1901, and his son Willard, who was then president, spurned Harvester’s advances. Deere & Company, however, made an offer that Van Brunt couldn’t refuse, and the two companies consolidated in June of 1911, with the factory remaining at Horicon under the existing management.
As many large farm machinery builders did, Deere took advantage of the name, reputation, and good will of their newly-acquired company. Thus, the new grain drills, broadcast seeders, and lime and fertilizer distributers, being sold through the various Deere branch houses all bore the name John Deere-Van Brunt. This was true until about the 1960s, when the Van Brunt name was dropped.
From Farm Collector