The Avery Co.

Let's Talk Rusty Iron: Adversity was no match for Robert Hanneman Avery.

By Sam Moore
Published on May 1, 2007
article image
courtesy Sam Moore
An 1880's trade card from the Avery Planter Co.

There have been two farm implement companies named Avery. One, the B.F. Avery Co., was located in Louisville, Ky., and was absorbed by Minneapolis-Moline in 1951. The other firm, the Avery Co. of Peoria, Ill., is the subject of this column.

Robert Hanneman Avery was born on Jan. 17, 1840, on his father’s recently cleared farm near Galesburg, Ill. The boy helped with farm work while attending “common school” and then the Knox Academy in Galesburg. There were several small factories and a foundry in town, and Avery’s great-uncle was a tinkerer and inventor, so the youth was probably exposed to things mechanical from an early age.

Avery taught school for a year or two and then, on Aug. 15, 1862, enlisted in the Union Army. Two years later, Sgt. Robert Avery was captured at Cedar Point, Ala., during the battle of Mobile Bay. He was held as a prisoner of war for more than eight months, with most of that time spent at Andersonville, a hellish prison camp in Georgia. Some 13,000 Union prisoners died at Andersonville from starvation, disease and exposure. Determined to survive, Robert Avery took every precaution he could to stay healthy. Fighting to keep his mind active and his hopes alive, he spent most of his time thinking about farm tools and implements. According to legend, Avery designed a 1-row cultivator in his mind. He scratched out plans for the implement in the bare earth of the prison enclosure and constructed a model of the machine from scraps of wood.

Avery no stranger to adversity

Finally released from Andersonville prison and discharged from the Army, Avery (described then as a “poor gaunt skeleton”) went home to recuperate. After a bout of typhoid fever almost finished the job begun at Andersonville, Avery finally recovered enough to begin helping his brother on his farm. Later he rented his own farm and married in January 1867.

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