Branches Aplenty in this Family Tree

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Above: Ron Carver’s 1948 B.F. Avery Model V tractor is a wide-front machine on rubber.

The history of B.F. Avery tractors involves several different companies, including Cleveland Tractor Co., Massey-Harris Co., Cooperative Mfg. Co., Minneapolis-Moline Co., B.F. Avery Power Machinery Co. and Ford Motor Co., as well as distributors like Montgomery Ward & Co.

In the beginning

Benjamin Franklin Avery, born in 1801, started a blacksmith shop at Clarksville, Va., in 1825. The early corporation was called B.F. Avery & Sons Pioneer Plow Maker and moved to Louisville, Ky., in 1845. The company's specialty was the manufacture of plows, and by the late 1800s the company was the largest manufacturer of plows in the world. During those years, the company also ventured into manufacture of horse-drawn fertilizer spreaders and planters.

B.F. Avery & Sons Co. jumped into the tractor manufacturing business in 1915 with their 5,000-pound Louisville Motor Plow, one of a number of motor plows to come on to the market from 1915-1920. Selling points for the 20-hp machine included removable plows, which allowed the machine to perform other farm duties, and a removable engine, which could be taken out by removing only eight bolts. It was advertised as "The Perfect Deep Plowing Machine," with "Perfect Cooling" and "One Man Does It All." It is unclear why the Louisville Motor Plow, which was 7 feet wide, 13 feet long and 5-1/2 feet high, disappeared a year later, but clearly the company returned to a focus on farm implements.

A vision for the future

According to Luther D. Thomas in B.F. Avery, in about 1935 the designer of the Twin City tractor, Jack Junkin, was hired to design a B.F. Avery tractor. However, when Junkin died in 1936, other engineers finished his work.

In the late 1930s the company commissioned Cleveland Tractor Co. of Cleveland to build and market a wheeled tractor to operate with B.F. Avery's implements. In 1939, the Cleveland General Model GG appeared, the only rubber-tired tractor out of CTC's 40-some crawler models.

The Model GG was Cleveland Tractor Co.'s Model HG crawler with rubber tires. When the tracked Model HG, which was made from 1939-1944, became the rubber-tired General GG, it carried a single front wheel and was of row-crop configuration suitable to pull one 14-inch plow. The GG and the HG both used a 4-cylinder Hercules IXA3 flathead engine of 113 cubic inches and 3-inch-by-4-inch bore and stroke. Some sources say the GG was made from 1939-1941; others suggest that production continued into 1942.