There have been two farm implement companies named Avery. One, the B.F. Avery Co., was located in Louisville, Kentucky, and was absorbed by Minneapolis-Moline in 1951. The other firm, the Avery Co. of Peoria, Illinois, is the subject of this column.
Robert Hanneman Avery was born on January 17, 1840, on his father’s recently cleared farm near Galesburg, Illinois. 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
