If you spend much time in the old iron hobby, you begin to be a bit of a student of life a century ago. One hundred years ago, the business of tractor manufacture was about to break wide open. Steam traction engines and portable gas engines were popular labor-saving devices, but farm laborers paid increasing attention to the siren’s call of factory work. World War I loomed on the horizon, American women did not yet have the right to vote and a new employee at Ford Motor Co. was paid $2.40 ($56.28 today) for nine hours’ work.

Today we hold a magnifying glass over a decades-old photograph, examining every detail as if it held a clue to life in the past. We are less focused on life 100 years from now. Will anyone even care about antique farm equipment then? And if they do, what will capture their interest? Will it be the New Generation tractors of the 1960s or the earliest days of GPS-guided tractors of the 1980s? Will the tractors of the 1920s and ’30s even merit museum display space, or will they long since have been sold for scrap?

And what, pray tell, will collectors 100 years hence use as reference material? Today’s technology makes photography immediate and accessible. But that same technology will inevitably be rendered dusty and archaic in no time. Remember film? Heck, remember floppy discs? With cameras in every cell phone and the pace of “modern living” what it is, albums packed with printed photographs are quick becoming a thing of the past. The century-old postcards, journals, letters and newspaper accounts we pore over today are dinosaurs too. What sources will amateur historians 100 years from now dig through? Blogs? Emails? Text messages?

Whether we mean to or not, we leave tracks. But how will the legacy of our times be understood? I often think of the blacksmith who fashioned an elegant little 1-inch-wide representation of a horseshoe and gave it to me for luck. “A hundred years from now, somebody will find that,” he mused. “And he’ll say, ‘Damn! Horses back then were tiny!’” Preserving the past is an inexact science. Looking back or looking forward, beware of tiny horses! FC 

For a certain segment of the population – the segment that loves old iron and ice cream in equal measure – an antique tractor show is about as good as it gets. We celebrate that confectionary confluence in this issue with “steam cream,” Terry Spahr’s unique twist on ice cream.

An active member of the Los Angeles Live Steamers Railroad Museum, Terry paired an interest in a scale model Gaar-Scott steam engine with a passion for ice cream, and voila! Steam cream was born. Driven by sweet memories of his mother’s homemade ice cream, Terry sourced equipment old and new and then buckled down to the thankless job of creating recipes, testing processes and producing freezer can after freezer can of the stuff – 150 gallons in one year alone.

It is a tale that could make grown men and lady editors weep: Terry’s produced vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, blackberry, berry-berry-berry, fresh peach, coffee, butter pecan, banana, chocolate malt, chocolate marshmallow, rocky road #1 and #2, AC-DC (amaretto cherry dark chocolate), pumpkin pecan, chocolate Heath Bar crunch, chocolate marshmallow Heath Bar crunch, frozen lemonade, cherry pomegranate lemonade, raspberry lemonade, double chocolate sour cherry, hot cinnamon apple, rum raisin and gingerbread.

People are drawn to the old iron hobby for a variety of reasons: passion for history, interest in early mechanization, affection for a particular manufacturer. Nostalgia is another big driver – and what churns up more nostalgia than ice cream, particularly homemade ice cream? For most people, ice cream is a joy first experienced in early childhood and is ever after inextricably bound up in past and present. I well remember the look that settled on my dad’s face as he recalled, half a century later, boyhood memories of being given a dime and sent to the market (on foot! alone!) to fetch a quart of ice cream for the family on a summer afternoon.

In most of the country, show season is still a ways off. For now, you’ll have to make do with Dairy Queen. But it won’t be long until ice cream freezers powered by stationary engines or tractors or even scale model steam engines will stir up a powerfully sweet blend of nostalgia. And on a warm summer day, surrounded by the sounds and smells of a tractor show, it doesn’t get much better than that! FC 

Take an industrial size eraser and wipe out almost every store you’ve ever patronized. Drain your bank account to an impossibly low balance. Run a farm; feed a family. Forget about a second income; you barely have a first income. Times have been hard; times will be hard yet again. If you need a tool or a tractor, you’d try almost anything – including building it yourself – before you’d shell out the money to buy it.

In the pages of Farm Collector, we routinely consider such a world, but it’s always been a bit of a textbook exercise for me. That all changed when I attended a national meeting of the Mid-West Tool Collectors Assn. last fall. Displays at that event showcased craftsman-made and hand-forged tools. Design and construction of the pieces ran the gamut from primitive to elegant. Each tool there spoke volumes about need, pride of workmanship, artistry, creativity and resourcefulness.

Members of the M-WTCA take their history seriously and are eager to share the results of their research. Mid-West Tool Collectors Show Impressive Antiques gives a glimpse of a world you’ll not find anywhere else, and one that the tool collectors work passionately to preserve. But make no mistake: They’re having a great time in the process, and they’d be happy to welcome you into the fold.

Writer Bill Vossler also explores home-built items this month in the article Homemade Tractor Craze. In the early 1900s, tractors were beyond the reach of most farmers. More than a few, however, stepped up to the plate and built their own, using whatever mechanical relics they could scrape together.

Predictably, most such efforts failed – but some actually worked. The fact that any did is astonishing. More than a century ago, even stationary engines and steam engines were still novelties for many farmers. Imagine the learning curve involved in building your own tractor when such a device barely existed 10 years earlier. Picture yourself building a computer out of a pocket calculator and you start to get an idea of the challenge.

A story about a handmade scale model tractor – Scale Model of International Harvester Titan Works – rounds out the trifecta of articles in this issue touching on a common theme. Times change, but in one form or another, good old American ingenuity endures. FC 

If you live north of the Mason-Dixon Line, this is the time of year that tests character. “Winter is not a season,” American writer Sinclair Lewis observed decades ago. “It’s an occupation.” It is easy to feel beleaguered in February.

As a service to Farm Collector readers in northerly climes, it was the editor’s intention to produce our first-ever Hawaiian Islands issue this month. Packed with in-depth articles on antique iron in cane and pineapple fields, it would have showcased a little-known corner of the old iron hobby and been a much needed balm for those weary of cold and snow. Such a project would, naturally, have required extensive time in the field, marked by long days spent conducting interviews and photo shoots, but that is an editor’s lot and whining doesn’t get the job done any faster, now does it?

Regrettably, management did not share my enthusiasm for the project, at least to the extent that actual travel was involved. “See what you can find online,” the boss growled. Suffice to say that the view out my office window today shows not palm trees but a blanket of snow.

And so it is that in this issue of Farm Collector we delve into vintage jeeps that laugh at snow. Freelance writer Clell Ballard digs in deep, capturing the role played by the jeep when the snow flies in the Idaho backcountry. More workhorse than pleasure palace, the early jeep offered little protection from the elements. Back in the day, as Clell notes, that was just the way things were.

Want more? Throw another log on the fire and then check out Sam Moore’s column on the perils of winter travel 180 years ago. An account of an after-dark crossing of a river presumed to be frozen, in the midst of a howling blizzard, makes a jaunt in an unheated jeep seem like a day at the beach … almost.

Had enough? Take heart. Spring’s coming. With writer Jerry Schleicher’s help, we revisit check-row planting in this issue. Short of Hawaiian breezes, that’s about as good an antidote to winter as I know!  FC 

If you travel much, you learn how to pack a suitcase to use every inch of space. It’s an equally useful skill if you work for a magazine — a fact brought home to us as we produced this issue of Farm Collector.

This issue contains a record number of reader-submitted photos celebrating Show Season 2012. This year’s crop was the best ever, making the selection especially challenging. I take some comfort in the fact that we are able to post even more photos in 2012 Show Photos — Online Exclusive, but we still rolled and folded and tucked as many as we possibly could into the pages of this issue — even on this page, where you’re looking at a lovely winter scene courtesy of Deborah and Paul Spink, Varysburg, N.Y. The Spinks’ photo is not technically a show photo — but then this page is not technically part of the show photo section. Picture me sitting on a suitcase!

It seems we are forever working within constraints of one kind or another as we work to bring this hobby to your mailbox every month. Having an abundance of material, though, is a good problem. That is the beauty of old iron: There is an awful lot of it, and there are an awful lot of people who love it and work endlessly to preserve it. Every month, we do our level best to fill these pages with the very best material available. Need a resolution for the new year? Think like an editor and pack in as much of the good stuff as you possibly can! Happy New Year from all of us at Farm Collector. FC 

What rings more clearly in memory than recollection of holidays long since past? An extensive collection of rare pedal tractors — the subject of Bill Vossler's article Pedal Tractor Pride — is rich fodder for nostalgic reflections.

It is easy to look at collector Ron Fratzke’s relics and imagine the joyous squeals that greeted a gleaming new pedal tractor on some long-off Christmas morning. They say a man never forgets his first car; I’m betting the memory of his first pedal tractor — his first steering wheel! — looms equally large.

Today’s is a different world; I don’t know if pedal tractors are used as aggressively as they were decades ago, in a time before cable TV, video games, countless organized activities and a general glut of playthings in the average child’s life.

Back in the day, however, pedal tractors were subjected to use only slightly less rigorous than that experienced by tanks on the battlefield. OEM pedal tractors were routinely put to work in gravel, dirt, mud and sandbox. Those modified to handle implements or carts pulled their weight and then some (that of the long suffering family dog, for instance, or a couple of the smaller cousins).

Nor was it unusual, decades ago, for a pedal tractor to become a “hand-me-down” passed along to every child in the family. Used and abused, left outside, battered survivor of misadventures that invariably involved too much of something (speed, slope, weight), the average pedal tractor was pretty well spent by the time the kids moved on to bikes. It is no wonder that a good original is hard to find!

But the lowly pedal tractor was more than just fun and games. By the time the average child graduated from his pedal tractor days, he or she had a very clear idea of what tractors were used for and their importance on the family farm. In the world of toys, there aren’t that many that allow a child to test drive dad’s occupation, but farm kids have long enjoyed an enormous selection of farm-related toys.

Whether you’re remembering your childhood or watching a new generation of carpet farmers go to work, farm toys have a way of triggering sweet memories. ’Tis the season! Merry Christmas and happy holidays from all of us at Farm Collector. FC 

While reading a book about two young New York women who spent a year teaching school in northwestern Colorado in 1916, I was surprised to encounter a passage describing a once thriving business in Auburn, N.Y. “D.M. Osborne & Co. sold harvesters, mowers and other farm equipment,” notes author Dorothy Wickenden in Nothing Daunted. “Its phalanxes of factory buildings along Genesee Street had 3,500 employees, and by the turn of the century, it had become the third largest enterprise of its kind in the country.”

By 1900, Auburn had a population of 35,000. The exact time when Osborne’s workforce there numbered 3,500 is not clear from Wickenden’s account, but it appears to predate 1900 — meaning Osborne employed at least 10 percent of the local population in the late 1800s.

That discovery clicks neatly with an article in this issue on a restored Osborne No. 8 reaper. Written by veteran Farm Collector contributor Bill Vossler, Antiques Collector Restores Osborne No. 8 Reaper describes a technologically advanced device for its time and one that signaled the end of an era in which harvest was painfully slow and physically exhausting.

Given the difficulty associated with learning the history of companies that ceased operation more than a century ago, I was astonished to stumble onto this snippet of Osborne history. And there was more: The family included two prominent suffragists and the founder’s son (Thomas Mott Osborne) was actively involved in political reform and social justice.

One thing led to another. A 1912 New York Times article found online included an Osborne official’s testimony during the International Harvester antitrust suit. Col. Edwin D. Metcalf, general manager of harvester manufacturing for Osborne, described the company’s efforts to sell out to the newly formed International Harvester Co. Rebuffed, company officials then unsuccessfully pitched Osborne to McCormick-Deering. After the asking price was slashed, International finally came around in 1903. The deal was kept secret for two years, allowing Osborne to collect money due from farmers who’d bought equipment on the installment plan. “We had about $3,000,000 (about $79 million today) in bills receivable all over the world, and our experience was that farmers wouldn’t pay notes held by a company in liquidation or that had gone out of business,” Metcalf explained.

A tangle of loose ends, coming together at the right time, shines a bit of light on a dark corner of history. Timing, as they say, is everything. FC