MOUNT VERNON — Sometimes I lose track of various planned History Knox columns, then rediscover them later when I’m tearing through my files searching for something to write about, usually only hours before my absolute drop-dead deadline (for all true journalists know that the editors don’t REALLY mean the first deadline or two they throw out there, right? Right? Uh oh.).
Anyway, this time around I rediscovered some photos I took when David Greer generously shared his time with me by showing me around the Knox County Agricultural Museum, a real treasure trove of vintage rural life at the Knox County Fairgrounds.
One thing I meant to do at that time was a feature about some of the tractors in the museum, and so I took a number of pictures. Part of this was selfish fun. Although I’m infamously artsy and bookish, I grew up on a small farm in Crawford County. My dad worked full-time at the Empire Detroit steel mill in Mansfield, but he did devote time on evenings and weekends to some small-scale farming activities, such as keeping chickens and cultivating a garden so large it had to be plowed with a full-sized tractor.
For that, not long after we moved there around 1971, Dad bought an old John Deere utility tractor for $250. Reflecting on it now, he said that he doesn’t know what year it was, and that it was pretty old when he got it, so he supposes it was from the 1940s or even earlier.
Looking at images online, my memory of the tractor lines up with photos of John Deere B series tractors from the mid to late 1930s, when the name was still on the nose of the tractor, in arched letters.
Dad used that tractor all the time, plowing, disking, pulling things. He also repainted it with genuine John Deere green and yellow, making it a very sharp looking tractor. I remember sitting in his lap and steering it when I was no more than 6 or 7 years old. I think it was a year later when he coached me for the first time on how to turn the fly wheel on the side of the tractor to get the thing started, because it did not have an electric starter. It was tough, but I got it going eventually.
The winter after that was the infamous winter of 1978, where the nastiest winter storm in living memory whipped through Ohio. That was 45 years ago this week, incidentally. My dad only made it home from the steel mill by following the line of telephone poles, for the rural roads of Crawford County had been virtually erased by the blizzard.
After that, Dad decided he’d had enough of country life, sold the John Deere for the same $250 he’d paid for it, and moved in closer to Mansfield. I wonder if that old tractor is still out there somewhere.
I thought of it because the Ag Museum has a vintage Deere, though it looks to me to be a later model. Like my dad’s tractor, it has the long, exposed steering shaft on top of the tractor, but the one in the museum has an unusual top tank which the steering shaft passes through.
Online searches tell me that this unusual design was for John Deere propane-fueled tractors.
Another at the museum is a red Allis-Chalmers tractor, which reminds me of the one that my grandpa, Boston Jordan, had when he lived on a farm on Cairns Road, near Mansfield.
One of my earliest memories is visiting Grandma and Grandpa Jordan and looking down across the field that stretched from the house down to the railroad tracks, seeing Grandpa running the tractor back and forth. His Allis-Chalmers was older than the one in the Ag Museum, which is not surprising as these memories come from the 1970s.
A less direct connection for me is the Silver King tractor on display at the museum. It was once the property of Luke Biggs, an important Knox County farmer whose memory is honored by the Kiwanis Club with the annual Luke Biggs Award, which I remember covering for the Mount Vernon News a decade-and-a-half ago. When my family moved closer to Mansfield after the blizzard, we ended up about halfway between Mansfield and Shelby.
Just a little ways north of Shelby is the town of Plymouth, which is where the Fate-Root-Heath Co. built the Silver King tractors. They still hold a town festival there in honor of the gleaming tractors.
The Fate Company started manufacturing in 1886, but only moved into motorized vehicles after mergers had made it the Fate-Root-Heath Co. After they had made both Plymouth automobiles and tractors for a while, they were sued by General Motors, who were also manufacturing a Plymouth car.
It was then — 1933 — that the name “Silver King” was born, and production of the tractors continued until 1954. According to the website FarmCollector.com, Henry Ford was impressed enough by Silver King tractors that he bought two, just to disassemble them and see how they worked.
He was reported to have said, “They were the best on the market at the time, but had the worst marketing program of any company.”
Somewhere in the distant corners of my memories, I can still hear the clattering rhythms of those tractor engines. Today’s huge, efficient tractors are impressive achievements, but they just aren’t the same.
On an old-style tractor, you had to be in tune with everything: the land around you, the weather, and above all, the cranky mechanical contraption you were driving. But it was an experience to remember. At least we can all be happy to know the machines are living on at the Knox County Agricultural Museum.
