John Deere, Dubuque, Iowa Tractor Works

The John Deere, Dubuque Tractor Works recently celebrated sixty years as a production plant manufacturing the small John Deere Tractors along with Crawlers. This celebration was named: "Full Throttle Day." Here you are viewing the gallery of some of the Tractors built in Dubuque. This factory is located alongside the Mississippi River and in the Northeast corner of Iowa. To become an employee of this manufacturer you must pass a fourteen step program of screenings, testing and physicals.

This John Deere Tractor fitted with a sickle mower is not in the traditional John Deere Paint because it was built for a Department of Transportation deployment as a roadside mower to reduce the amount of weeds and also tall grasses along side the roads. If my memory serves me correctly this model was manufactured in the 1950s era.

The "Flower Child" has two nephews who currently work at the John Deere, Dubuque, Iowa Tractor Works. They are both welders. Many years ago, Flower Child's Dad was a Fork Lift operator at this same factory. He worked in the shipping department and one of his favorite stories was way back during the Cold War when our country was selling farming and construction equipment to the former USSR. He always told us about shipping buckets to be fitted on crawlers which the Soviets had bought. Their original contract did not require the buckets. The buckets were ordered after the crawlers arrived in Russia. The cost of the buckets was a fair amount of money, but the shipment of the buckets was much more expensive than the cost of the buckets.

Of course My Dad always quickly informed us that the Soviets were using money from the U. S. A. to make the purchases.