John Fletcher Steward was born in Little Rock Township, Kendall County, Illinois on June 23, 1841. In 1861 he enlisted in Company F, 127th Illinois Volunteers. He suffered from exposure at the siege of Vicksburg in 1863 and was discharged for medical reasons. He later rejoined the Union army as part of the Veteran Reserve Corps and was finally discharged on July 4, 1865 at Detroit. Here he met and married Sarah Louise Chandler.
The couple moved to Plano, Illinois, where Steward took up employment as a workman at an agricultural machinery factory owned by the Gammon and Deering Company. He rose to foreman before one of the partners, William Deering, moved the factory to Chicago under the name William Deering Company. Steward went with Deering and became factory superintendent.
In March 1871 Steward left the Deering Company to join Major John Wesley Powell's second Colorado Canyon expedition as an assistant geologist. By November, however, he had become too ill to spend the winter in the canyon. He left the expedition on November 11 and hobbled painfully through miles of wilderness before finding transportation.
He returned to his position with the William Deering Company and took charge of the company's patent matters. In the late 1890s, he began to compile notes and reminiscences concerning the history of the agricultural machinery industry. He planned to write a book. His primary motivation was to dispute the importance of Cyrus Hall McCormick. McCormick had been the founder and president of Deering's chief competitor, the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. At the time Cyrus McCormick was widely hailed as one of the great inventors of the age, and the McCormick Company used his image as a kind of advertising logo.
Steward hoped to show that many other inventors contributed far more to the development of agricultural machinery than Cyrus McCormick. In fact, Steward argued that Cyrus McCormick was not even the true inventor of the reaper. In the course of his research he corresponded with many of the pioneers in the field. Each in turn submitted their own account of their accomplishments.
In 1902, the Deering Harvester Company merged with the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, the Plano Manufacturing Company, the Milwaukee Harvester Company and Warder, Bushnell and Glessner to become the International Harvester Company. The Deering and McCormick families jointly managed the new company, and Steward became supervisor of patents.
With the merger, the old rivalry between the McCormicks and Deerings began to fade and Steward seems to have abandoned his book. At any rate he did not publish it during his lifetime. He remained as supervisor of patents for the International Harvester Company until his death in 1915. In 1931 his manuscript was posthumously published as The Reaper: A History of the Efforts of Those Who Justly May Be Said to Have Made Bread Cheap (New York: Greenberg, 1931).
After the merger, Steward appears to have turned his energies to other historical research including the history of the Native Americans in Kendall County, Illinois and his farm in that same county.
