Portal to the Past
Collectible wrenches tell story of antique farm equipment
Bill Vossler
Mark Gilles fell in love with old cast iron wrenches when he was 14 years old. “My grandpa had an old Farmall tractor, and there were some of those old wrenches hanging on a wall in a shed,” he recalls. “There was an old monkey wrench with a wooden handle, a crescent wrench and others, and one day he gave them to me. That was when I started collecting.”
But Mark, who lives in Monticello, Minn., liked the old wrenches even before that. “They fascinated me, the different sizes and shapes, old cast iron ones or pressed iron ones,” he says. “They were just interesting to look at.”
So he began to buy them. “When I was young, I used to go to flea markets and there would be wrenches laying around that you could buy for a dime or a quarter each. I put them in cream cans, until one day I realized I had a few cream cans full, and I started cleaning them and hanging them up. That’s how it all started.”