-- This story by Roger Pinckney is reprinted with permission from South Carolina Farmer, the magazine of the S.C. Farm Bureau Federation.

Old tractors, names you likely never heard of. Moline, Cockshutt, Co-op, Oliver, David Brown.

Rough riding, slow moving, clumsy, noisy, smoky, uncomfortable, downright deadly sometimes.

Rumley, Hart-Parr, not Ford but Fordson and Massey in three flavors.

No air conditioning, no cabs, no hydraulics, no shift-on-the-go, no power steering, no lights, no batteries, no parts. Hand clutches, hand starters, slow PTO, no PTO. Who needs ’em? Who wants ’em?

Well, maybe nobody really needs ’em, but lots of folks want ’em. Just ask John Fay Berry of Saluda County. Berry owns a Waterloo Boy, one of the very few built by the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Traction Company before its takeover by John Deere.

John Deere got started back in 1868 when a blacksmith of the same name hammered the first steel moldboard plow out of a sawmill blade.

Deere expanded into other horse- and mule-drawn machinery and by 1914 was trying, less than successfully, to get into the tractor business.

That changed four years later, when Deere purchased Waterloo for $2.7 million – a lot of money in those days.

John Deere went on to build 21,000 Waterloo Boys between 1918 and 1924, then moved on to their famous “alphabet models,” A, B, G, R, and history was born.

These were the glory days of American agriculture. Europe was decimated by the Great War and dependent on American grain. The government was guaranteeing $2 wheat.

Farm income doubled, land prices tripled and the Waterloo Boy was the wonder of the age. It started on gas and, once the engine heated up, you could switch to kerosene – less money, more power.

There seemed to be no limit to what a Waterloo Boy could do. Cross an earthquake with a volcano, mount it on wheels, paint it green, and you’d have a close match.

Bucking, snorting and clattering along on steel wheels, its two cylinders could outpull a dozen horses.

Or so they said. James Watt, back around 1800, came up with “horsepower” to sell his steam engines, figuring one horse on a 20-foot sweep could lift 3,300 pounds one foot in one minute.

Tractor makers picked up the term and split it in two – one for the drawbar, another for the flatbelt side pulley, standard equipment on tractors in those days.

The Waterloo Boy Model N made 12 horsepower at the drawbar, 25 at the belt, and had a top speed of three miles per hour.

Berry found his Waterloo Boy in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1997, not 10 miles from where it was built.

“I couldn’t afford one already restored,” he remembers, “so I begged this restorer to find me one I could do myself. It was sitting out in the middle of a hog pen, totally rusted out. He walked me through the process, helped me find the parts I needed.”

Berry’s restoration was two years long, but now the Waterloo Boy looks, if not like the day it left the factory, at least the day after.

What would possess a man to attempt such an expenditure of money and time? Berry says he is just celebrating his birthright.

“I was born to these old John Deeres. My daddy had a 1939 B and I was plowing with it by the time I was seven years old. I always wanted a Model G but we never got one. Man, there is magic in that two-cylinder sound.”

A Harley-Davidson man might tell you the same thing. There are better bikes, smoother ones, longer-running ones, but nothing beats that two-cylinder sound.

Berry has his G now – 50 other tractors, too, John Deeres mostly. “One of every model,” his wife quips.

Sybil Berry is a big promoter of ˇthe Richland Creek Antique Fall Festival which the Berrys have hosted on their farm for 11 years running. (See sidebar.) The event draws nearly 2,000 – proof enough that John Fay Berry is not the only one in love with old iron.

As good as a Waterloo Boy was, in the early days of the century, the market belonged to Mogul.

“Buy it now and save the feed!” read a 1914 ad for the Mogul 8-16. At only $675 cash, f.o.b. Chicago, the Mogul was International Harvester’s single-cylinder economy model, guaranteed to run on “kerosene, benzine, naphtha, and other low-grade distillates.”

“Sell the horses, sell the feed, buy a Mogul, save time and money” – thousands did. By 1915, one-third of the tractors sold in the U.S. were Moguls. John Deere and 56 other makers fought over the rest of the pie.

Watkins Martin of Newberry has 20 antique tractors, including a 1917 10-20 Mogul, the 8-16’s big brother, which could pull a three-bottom plow (the 8-16 could handle only two).

His 10-20 has been in his family since it was new.

“That tractor has been within a five-mile radius of my place for 92 years. They used it to run a sawmill with a flatbelt. They’d drive to where they were gonna build the house, saw up the pine logs, air-stack the lumber, then move on to the next job.”

The Mogul was in continuous use until about 1950, then it sat idle for more than 40 years.

In 1991, Watkins Martin decided to bring it back to life. Parts, always a problem in tractor restoration, were especially hard to come by.

“I advertised in antique tractor magazines, and I found a magneto clear up in Minnesota.”

Why in the world would he go to all that trouble? “I like to preserve history,” he says, “and so much of our history is mechanical. Besides, I enjoy driving them, and I just like to hear ’em run.”

Though Mogul sold the most machines, credit for inventing the tractor goes to Charles Hart and Charles Parr, two Wisconsin engineering students who hitched a single-cylinder stationary engine to a plow back in 1903.

The first Hart-Parrs were cumbersome oil-cooled jobs, big as steam engines, designed for breaking sod in the prairie states.

The Hart-Parr Company later moved to Charles City, Iowa, where they built smaller models like the Cropmaker, Little Devil and Old Reliable, from 17 to 30 hp, suitable for the average-sized farm. All were so slow, it was said that “a rabbit could jump faster backwards.”

In 1929, when Hart-Parr merged with the Oliver Chilled Plow Company, there was some dispute over what to call the tractor.

J.D. Oliver III pulled rank. He had the most money in the venture and the tractor would bear his name, period. Too bad. Though Oliver billed itself as “the plowman of the world,” and a 50-bottom Oliver plow held the national record, it was behind three Oil Pull Rumleys, not Hart-Parrs.

Oliver tractors were good enough in the field, but they never successfully competed with International Harvester or John Deere in the marketplace. By the 1950s most farmers wanted their tractors red or green. By the 1960s, Oliver parts were expensive and scarce.

ˇBy the 1970s, Oliver was gone, acquired – then shut down – by White Motor Co.

Watkins Martin has a Hart-Parr, too – one of the “dispute tractors,” a 1930 row crop, the ninth machine off the Charles City assembly line after the Oliver takeover, still bearing the Hart-Parr logo. Its history gives it special value, Martin says, and though it’s not running now, it someday will be again.

A.C. McLeod, a retired Chesterfield County farmer, has 15 old tractors – Cases, Internationals and John Deeres – with the goal of owning “one of each type commonly used in the Southeast.”

He also has 25 cars and trucks, hay mowers, potato diggers, just about anything else you might hook behind a tractor, and attendant scales, clocks, and gas-powered washing machines common in the hard old days.

They are all on display in about 12,000 climate-controlled square feet near McBee. His Mac’s Pride Museum is indeed something to be proud of.

“I want to show younger folks the tools grandpa and grandma used to make a living,” he says.

Retired? The McLeod family is famous for its peaches. They also have a meat market, restaurant and bakery along the main route from Charlotte, N.C., to the Grand Strand.

“Angus steaks, fresh bread, and the best ice cream you ever tasted. Some folks stop by on their way to the beach; others make a special trip. There’s no charge for looking at the tractors, just a little collection box by the door.”

Keith Allen of Dillon County is a hard man to track down, keeping up with his tobacco, corn and peanuts near Latta. His wife, Libby, says he has 30 old tractors, about “half of them running, and the restoration on the others will last him the rest of his days.”

When you finally get in touch with Keith, he’ll likely be in his pickup cab on the cell phone, fading in, fading out, with his two-way radio yammering in the background.

Like John Fay Berry, Allen is a John Deere man, with just a “sprinkling” of other brands in his collection.

“I was raised up on a 1948 B on a tobacco farm,” he remembers.“ I loved farming with it and even loved working on it, but tractors now-days are just too complicated for the average man. I keep the old ones running as a way to preserve history.

“I love old farm machinery. I still even have a working pull-behind combine I keep running to thresh out my oats.”

Of the 30, what’s his favorite? Easy answer: a 1936 AOS, a two-cylinder A, low mounted and streamlined so it won’t snag low limbs in fruit orchards. It’s the 15th of only 815 that were made.

“It’s fully restored, except....” and then there is a long pause, “... for that little knob on top of the radiator cap.”

What?

“Yeah, you know, the old Deeres had a big oval cap so you could fill the radiator with a bucket. The knob that holds it on isn’t original. I’m still looking for one, but I can fabricate one if I have to.”

A single knob that keeps a restoration from being complete? Yep. Gives you an idea how detail-oriented these antique tractor guys can be.

Forgive them this fine madness, this focus bordering on obsession. Tolerate the time and money spent on machines whose names we have almost forgotten. For these old tractors, as dangerous and cantankerous as they were, fed our grandparents, even great-grandparents. And for a time, they fed the world.

They continue to remind us how far we have come since we gave up on horses and mules.

Besides, it’s good just to hear them run.

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