Little Treasure on the Prairie
November 2003
Bill Vossler
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Dale and Martha Hawk Museum
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When Lowell Johnson received a call from a California man offering to organize the antique wrench display at the Dale & Martha Hawk Museum, he thought it was a joke. Who would travel 2,200 miles to a rural Wolford, N.D., museum to put the tools in order? 'He told me what material he would need, and I just thought, well ...,' Lowell, president of the museum's board of directors, recalls.
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The man suddenly appeared on Memorial Day 1999 ready to work after making the trip from California.
'He had never been to the museum,' Lowell says, 'but his friend had, and this California man just wanted to do his part.'
It's funny how that sort of thing happens with this prairie museum. The museum's previous curators left after Labor Day 2002, and Richard and Emily Roberts, an RVer couple from Texas enchanted with North Dakota, enjoyed the museum so much that they volunteered to help. They're now the de facto curators and live in the farmhouse where the museum founders, Dale and Martha Hawk, lived until they passed away in 1985 and 1997 respectively.
Touching history
The museum began decades ago when Dale and Martha traveled in their 1947 Ford implement truck searching for old farm tractors, implements, cars and trucks - anything old that would add to the museum. Dale's intention was to build a collection of restored farm machinery, but as he grew older and realized the collection he built could be dispersed, his thoughts turned toward the construction of a museum.
The Hawks' hard work left a legacy of old and rare farm items, the choicest of which may be the Hackney Auto Plow. It's one of only three known to exist, and the only one of the three that still works. Dale once proudly paraded the Hackney, but a few years back, the board of directors decided against that since the machine is so valuable. Hackney descendants heard of the machine and 27 of them held a weekend family reunion at the museum during the summer of 1998. 'That machine had to be Dale Hawk's favorite,' Richard says. 'Almost every old photo with Dale in it shows him sitting on the Hackney.'
The museum also houses a rare Nilson Senior tractor, a Model 24-36, which was manufactured about 1919 by the Nilson Tractor Co. of Minneapolis, Minn., and sold new for $2,475. There's also an elusive 8-16 Mogul tractor, which Dale was restoring when he died. The painting was finished, but the Mogul's gas tank and fuel lines needed work, so Lowell, Richard and others finished the restoration this past winter. Locating restoration parts frustrated the men, but most of the missing parts were eventually found. The actuator bracket in the transmission was actually located in the machine's toolbox. A couple of pieces of flatiron were cut, holed and sized to fabricate the Mogul's bracket. Now it's fully restored and on display.
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