The first tractor on our road was a Ford. Its low profile and flared tire guards make it seem almost roadster-like, sporty, in comparison with todays' closed-cab machines. I remember my father's delight when our neighbor and close friend down the road bought that Ford. It plowed fields and gardens and with a rear blade did all our snow removal for twenty years. I think for the rest of his life, though he never farmed in later years, my dad wanted to buy one of those tractors. Before he died we drove about looking for one to restore.
Franklin County is a prosperous agricultural area and most of its new farm equipment is kept in good order. There is not the mechanical blight nor the tragedy of good machines going to ruin in the edges of fields here that is the case in other states. At the same time, however, the field edges and barnyards of the county are a veritable museum of twentieth century farm equipment.
Some of the equipment sits now decades later and vine covered in the same place it was last used. A few pieces have been moved to a prominent place by the road or in the yard and serve as special decorations. Here and there equipment is piled in the agricultural equipment version of a graveyard. And around the county there are several places where the old equipment--mostly tractors--is being restored and lined up proudly in the yard.
Anyone who would understand our use of the land must give attention to the use of power equipment to manage fields. The shift from mules to tractors is a real and symbolic watershed transition in American life. The tractor and its attached equipment represented progress in a way it is now hard to appreciate. Although I saw it and lived at its edge, the agricultural life of hand tossing hay or of chopping corn was ancient, laborious, difficult. I do not remember a man ever lamenting the loss of conversation to the savings in labor and time represented by the mule to tractor transition.
Farming is hard work even with machines and only the most naively nostalgic and inexperienced could contemplate a return to mule farming. I know well what my mentor in many of these things, Wendell Berry, would think of this claim; he has repudiated tractors and returned to mule farming. But I stand by my claim, not so much because I don't sympathize with Wendell Berry as because I recall how much tractors genuinely meant without regret or remorse or sense of loss to my father and grandfather and uncles and the men all around us. Tractors made their work easier and their lives better.
The tractor history of the twentieth century can be found in the edges of fields within twenty-five miles of Winchester. These abandoned things are important markers of the history of agriculture in the county and deserve recollection for the sake of that history.
Sampler of Tractors and Equipment [Link]