Collection Honors IH Legacy
One of the largest International Harvester collections in the U.S. features some of the most varied and unusual collectible items
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International Harvester Co. construction toys in Butch Bjorklund’s collection.
Bill Vossler
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Butch Bjorklund’s collection of farm-related items could be described in many ways.
It is one of the largest International Harvester collections in the U.S., one of the most varied IH collections, and one with the most unusual items. Or you could describe it with one simple word: Wow!
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“That’s the reaction we get from people who come to look at what we have,” says Butch, who lives in Buffalo, Minn. “They’ll say, ‘I heard you had a bunch of IH stuff, but I didn’t realize you had this much.’”
Growing up on a farm near Buffalo, Butch used IH tractors with equipment from other manufacturers: a John Deere rake and 4-row corn planter, John Deere running gears on the gravity wagons and boxes, and a New Holland 77 hay baler. “Maybe those products were a little bit better than IH, or maybe a better price,” Butch says. “I can’t answer that. But my dad and uncles mostly believed in IH.” When Christmas and birthdays rolled around, Butch received IHC toys – and the die was cast.
Starting with the merger
A trip of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and so did Butch’s trip into collecting. “When Case and IH merged in 1985, I wondered what color the new toys might become: white or orange like Case, or red like IH, maybe,” he says. “When they merged, as a remembrance of the company, I bought an IH toy from a dealer in Buffalo.”
His wife, Bev, was intrigued by the toy, and asked if the dealership had any others. “The following weekend we bought several more toys. After we had all their varieties, we bought more at the Watertown, Minn., dealership. After that, one thing just led into another,” he says with a shrug. Those first toys included the IH 886, 1086 and 1486 tractors.
Back to his roots
As the Bjorklund toy collection grew, the couple became interested in larger items from a variety of manufacturers. Some reflected fond memories of farm life; others were reminders of plain old work – like running a hand-crank cream separator.
“I have two McCormick brand cream separators. One is hand-crank and the other is electric/hand-crank, like the one we had on the farm,” Butch recalls. “Two or three times a winter, the electricity would go off, so we’d have to hand-crank the milk to separate the cream. If you ever cranked one of those, you remember the warning bell telling you to crank faster or you wouldn’t be separating the cream from the milk,” which meant losing cream and money.
Butch restored the hand-crank McCormick separator for his collection. He also used it to show his children and grandchildren how milk and cream were separated. “Unfortunately I didn’t get the settings just right,” he says, “so it didn’t work as well as I expected, but they got the idea.”
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