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"It had brush and junk growing into it," Roy remembers. "I had to take my tractor and get hold of it and pull it out. An awful lot of what I have salvaged has come out of ditches and piles of junk. I keep my eyes open."
Retrieving a John Deere Big No. 4 mower, he says, was a most difficult task. The mower, now completely renovated, was made in 1936 in Moline, Ill., and weighs about 1,500 pounds.
"The machine even had trees grown up through it because it had sat so long," he says. "I had a terrible time getting it out. It looked like junk. Now look at it."
"I saw something down in a pile of junk and it caught my eye," he says. "So I asked the worker to help me uncover it, and he didn't want to, but I insisted. And gradually, you could see what it was."
A close look at Roy's collection reminds one that the use of farm machinery with internal combustion engines is a relatively new phenomena, with most farmers - especially those on small farms in the South - using horse-and mule-drawn plows and mowers into the 1950s and beyond.
"Some people around here still use them, for their gardens," Roy says.
Roy has a large collection of horse-and mule-drawn plows. According to the parlance of Arkansas farmers, Roy says, a plow with one share is called a "one stalk" and a plow with two shares is a "two stalk."
"Different parts of the country, even different parts of the state, have their own terms for each farm implement," he says. Several of Roy's plows have full shares. Called "middle busters," they were used to plow carefully between rows of growing plants. He also has many "turning" or "listing" plows, which were made to turn the soil, either to the left or the right. Perhaps his most ingenious plow, though, is a "hillside plow," which has a hinged, adjustable share so that a farmer could always be "throwing" dirt to the high side when he went back and forth on a hillside.
"Since everything tends to go downhill," Roy says, "if you use an ordinary plow, over a period of time, 40 or 50 years of planting, the first thing you know, all the good soil has been thrower downhill, and you've got no soil on the hillside."