Let's Talk Rusty Iron

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Before the merger, the Roderick Lean Co. painted the New Century cultivator red with gold striping. The wheels, seat support, single trees and some of the draft hardware were green. The seat and the lifting handle ends appear black, and the shovels were blue. The Farm Tools catalog doesn't show a color picture of a cultivator, but it does have a hand-colored illustration of a Roderick Lean disk harrow. The disk had a yellow seat, seat support and fore-truck wheels. The disk gang supported weight boxes and the hitch parts were green. The frame and levers were red, and the disk blades were dark blue.

It's difficult to decipher colors from the black-and-white catalog picture, but I'd probably paint the cultivator red and green if I thought the machine was built prior to the merger.

If there's any hint of yellow, the cultivator was built after the merger, and in that case, I'd probably paint the wheels, seat and seat beam yellow, the frame, wooden handles and tongue red, the beams and hitch parts green, and the shovels blue. The lettering is black.

Farm Tools, Inc., survived the Depression and made and marketed its four lines of equipment until at least World War II. After the war, Vulcan made a mounted plow for the Silver King tractor, and Charlie Wendel indicates in his Encyclopedia of American Farm Equipment that Ford Motor Co. may have acquired the Peoria drill line in the early 1950s.

- Sam Moore became interested in agricultural machinery while growing up on a farm in western Pennsylvania. He now lives in Salem, Ohio, and collects antique tractors, implements and related items.

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