Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

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'Gears chilled almost glass hard.' 'The company of the starved rooster.' 'The first real competitor of the horse.' 'Burns kerosene; uses washed air.' With slogans like these, and tractor names like Yuba Ball Tread, Bullock Creeping Grip and Lambert Steel Hoof, perhaps it's no surprise that many tractor companies and their machines became extinct and were relegated to history's dustbin, creating what old-iron aficionados call 'orphan tractors.'

Orphan tractors are not, as one might imagine, poor tractors living in leantos, rejected by their families and eking out a meager life on rocky soil. Rather, an orphan tractor is simply a tractor whose parent company no longer exists. Purists define orphan tractors more narrowly as tractors whose companies failed. In other words, because Yuba Manufacturing Co. of Maryville, Calif., disappeared in 1931, Yuba Ball Tread tractors are orphans. Yet, because Cleveland Tractor Co. (as well as A.B. Farquhar Co., Nichols & Shepard Co., and others) were purchased by Oliver Corp., and Oliver eventually purchased by White Motor Corp., Cletrac, Farquhar, Nichols & Shepard tractors aren't orphans because their descendant companies leading up to White -now AGCO Corp. - still exist. Following this logic, they won't be orphans until AGCO goes out of business.

There are many reasons why 900 -yes, 900 - American tractor companies went out of business, most of them from the advent of the 'gasoline traction engine' at the turn of the 20th century through the 1940s, leaving thousands of orphaned tractor models.

Why did they die?

The reasons each tractor maker failed are as varied as the machines they built. Of the 900 orphaned tractor companies, some firms such as Abenaque Machine Works of Westminster Station, Vt., and its Abenaque tractors, disappeared because the factory was too far from major agricultural markets to sell enough tractors. (Early Abenaques appeared to use a box for the tractor operator's seat.) Some became orphaned, like the American Engine &Tractor Co. of Charles City, Iowa, because of bizarre business sensibilities. The company's founders believed its American tractor would succeed simply because it was manufactured in a building where a successful farm gas engine company had previously existed. The Aultman & Taylor Machinery Co. of Mansfield, Ohio, was orphaned because its machines were coveted by other companies, and the firm was sold to Advance-Rumely Co. of LaPorte, Ind., in 1924. Many, like the Geneva Tractor Co. of Geneva, Ohio, and its Adapto-Tractor became orphaned because the concept of a tractor was too new and III- defined, and thus didn't prove feasible in the field. Many, like Electric Wheel Co., along with the Quincy and Allwork tractors, went out of business when the stock market crashed in 1929.