A Stately Collection

Image Gallery A Lauson toy tractor

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Dale Swoboda of Two Rivers, Wis., knows more than the average collector about Wisconsin farm toy companies. 'When I was a kid growing up on a farm in Kewaunee County, I collected farm toys, but I never paid that much attention to where a lot of them were coming from,' Dale says. 'After I went to my first toy show in 1978, I started looking at where these models were being made.'

He began by reading a couple of books on toys by Ray Crilley and Chuck Burkholder. 'They had the toys and the names of the companies that made them, and then I started realizing, 'My gosh, there are a lot of Wisconsin farm toy makers - especially in plastic,'' Dale says.

The Product Miniature Corp. of Pewaukee, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee, made a Farmall M, Ford 8N, Ford Jubilee, Ford 900, some crawlers and IH trucks all out of plastic. Nowadays, the factory still makes plastic products - but not toys -and Product Miniature toys command a high price on the toy market.

Another small firm, the American Precision Co. of Milwaukee, made models of the Allis-Chalmers C and an Allis-Chalmers plow that was sold with it, as well as a disk and a harrow.

Kaysun Corp. of Manitowoc, Wis., on the other hand, was a prolific plastic toy maker in the 1950s and 1960s. Its most popular model was the Allis-Chalmers D-14. Four varieties of the toy were packaged and marketed: a fully-assembled toy tractor or kit through Allis-Chalmers dealers, another different kit in dime stores, and yet another kit through a cereal box-top offer. 'This D-14 series tractor was made in the 1960s, and you could send in a quarter and some certain cereal box-top - I can't for the life of me remember what brand it was, but I'm working on it - and you'd get the model sent to you free so you could put it together,' Dale says. 'Most people call the kits 'Strombecker' toys, because that's who distributed them, but they were actually Kaysun toys.'

Kaysun is still in business, Dale says, but it's not making farm toys. Some of its models are on display at its corporate offices, however, and if you turn them over and look, on the front axle is printed 'Kaysun, Manitowoc, Wisconsin.'

Monarch Plastics, out of Milwaukee, was another company that made plastic toys in Wisconsin. 'They made a Case DC tractor and Case SC tractor in plastic back in the 1950s, one with fenders and one without,' Dale remembers. 'They also made a Case manure spreader. If you find that toy in mint condition you're pretty lucky, because the top spreader bar is easily broken off it.'

Metal toys also were produced, some manufactured by Reuhl Products, Inc., of Madison, Wis., and very difficult to find today. 'They made a well-detailed toy in the late 1940s and 1950s and weren't in business that long, but they made some out standing toys,' Dale says. 'You could take all their toys apart, because they were made with screws, and put them back together again. You could order parts for them. They also made a lot of construction stuff, and their toys were expensive for the time.'

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