Mixed Bag

Image Gallery Above: A close-up of the flywheel side of Clem Anton’s 1916 Aultman & Taylor 30-60 tractor also shows the fan. (Photo courtesy of Nikki Rajala.)

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Old iron collector Clem Anton knows what he likes: old, interesting and rare equipment. When he climbs aboard his 1916 Aultman & Taylor 3060 tractor for circuits around the Pioneer Power Threshing Show and Old Timer's Reunion at Hanley Falls, Minn., each summer, he might as well be driving a 1957 Chevrolet automobile. "There are a few of the 30-60 Aultman & Taylors around, but they're highly collectible," he says. "They're like a '57 Chevy because they're such a favorite. They're considered very desirable by tractor collectors if they're available, because of the way they run and their massive size, I suppose. Plus, Aultman & Taylor had a name, just like Rumely did."

Start 'em up

Clem, who lives in Marshall, Minn., has a home-grown interest in old iron: His dad ran a tractor repair shop. "That's where we got started as kids, washing parts," he says. "We broke our knuckles on the McCormick-Deering 10-20, Farmall F-12 and John Deere Model D, and once in a while we'd get involved with one of the old tractors. Naturally, as we got older, we would take them apart and rebuild them. One thing led to another and in the 1960s my wife, Alice, and I started collecting tractors."

The first old tractor in their collection had dual use: It was part of the collection, but was also used to push snow out of the farmyard. "The 1935 Allis-Chalmers WC was just available at that time, and we bought it because it had a loader on it," Clem says. "After that, we just kind of started collecting tractors, or whatever we wanted."

"Whatever we wanted" includes old trucks, cars, gas engines, crawlers and tractors, many of them rare. Clem's truck collection, for instance, features a 1912 International Harvester high-wheeler, a rare 1920 Samson and a very rare 1920 Oldsmobile, as well as others from the teens and 1920s. Clem's car collection includes a 1909 Maxwell, a very rare model of a 1928 Buick Roadster and a 1929 Chevrolet Landau convertible. "Nobody ever sees one of those," he says.

Taking a different track

A rare experimental IH T-14 crawler is one of the gems in Clem's collection. "The TD-14 crawlers are a dime a dozen, but this is a T-14, which not too many people know about," he says. "It was an experimental tractor made for the U.S. Army. Only 135 of them were ever built." He says it looks just like an IH Model M, although components - like the carburetor, head and engine - are double the size of those in the M. With the exception of the tracks, Clem's T-14 required complete restoration.

His 1936 Allis-Chalmers LO crawler is really rare, too. "When everybody else was coming out with diesel engines, Allis-Chalmers tried to run diesel fuel in their gas tractor with spark plugs firing," Clem explains. "But it didn't work, and barely pulled its own weight. They were forced to stop selling them, and convert the ones already out in the field." It originally had a Delco fuel system, fired by spark plugs, but had very little power.

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