It would be less than completely accurate to say that Ryan Peters has cornered the market on McCormick-Deering experimental orchard tractors, but with only nine known to exist, his pair certainly puts him toward the top of the list.
Quick to make it clear that he grew up in town (“I am technically a city kid,” he says), and that his father’s primary hobby revolved around street cars and muscle cars, Ryan also wastes no time in explaining where his heart lies.
“My dad’s side of the family were part owners of an International Harvester dealership from 1921-’84,” he says. “I have a lot of tractors that members of the family bought new from that dealership.” At one time, his collection included 63 tractors, primarily Internationals.
As he built his International collection, Ryan – who lives in Maxwell, Iowa – concentrated on pre-1939 up to the 66 Series tractors. His collection includes original Farmalls, the 100,000th Farmall built, and oddball orchard and industrial models. Collectors in his area tend to focus on the Super M, Super 1206, Row-crop H, M, 400 and 450. “In Iowa, those tractors fall out of your ears,” he says. “I decided to collect things not commonly seen around here.”
Like, say, experimental orchard tractors.
“Needs tune-up; will run”
Ryan bought his first experimental orchard tractor in 2017 – a 1947 McCormick-Deering O-4 – near Norco, California, where, as recently as the 1960s, orange groves flourished. “I have friends there who keep an eye out for this kind of stuff for me,” he says. But Ryan found that first orchard himself – on craigslist.
“The ad read ‘1947 McCormick-Deering tractor, needs tune up, will run,” he recalls. “But there was no picture with the listing.” Ryan was skeptical; he kicked it around for a week or two. Then he took a chance.
“It is California,” he says, “and people there are not that in to old tractors. They might pick up a Farmall or an International. But that McCormick-Deering name, you don’t see that every day, and non-tractor people don’t know what it is.”
Full-dress orchards don’t grow on trees
Ryan contacted the seller, explaining that he lived in Iowa and wanted to make sure the tractor was not a duplicate of something already in his collection. He asked for another photo – and he got one. “Of course, it was a terrible picture, but I could make out that it was a full-dress orchard – with bat wings, cowl and sweep fenders – but I couldn’t tell if it was an O-4 or an O-6.”
Then the pace picked up. Things were moving rapidly at the suburb east of Los Angeles where the tractor was, and there was no time for Ryan to mail a check before the new owner scrapped everything on the property. “Full-dress orchards don’t grow on trees,” Ryan notes. Within a couple days, a friend in California wrote a check for the tractor, picked it up and texted Ryan: “It’s a 1947 O-4 but it has a really weird hitch.”
“I already had a little knowledge about experimental International Harvester orchard tractors,” Ryan says. “There was a two-page article about them in Red Power in 2009. I looked at the pictures in his text and said ‘OMG it’s an experimental.'” Suspecting that his friend wanted to keep the tractor, Ryan played dumb.
“It kind of looks factory,” Ryan told him, but his friend wasn’t having it. “‘Something’s up,’ he said. ‘Tell me about this hitch.’ When I told him the whole story, he groaned.”
100 percent dumb luck
Then, incredibly, Ryan found a second McCormick-Deering experimental tractor in Delhi, north of Fresno, California. “Another friend in California texted me a craigslist link,” he says. “I was in the middle of building a new shop, not buying tractors.” But his friend was persistent. “Seriously,” he said, “you need to look at this!”
When he did, he discovered it was an OS-4 (Orchard Special) experimental – and he already had an O-4 experimental. “So I called the seller,” Ryan says. “His dad had bought the tractor new from the dealer to use in his apple orchard, and the seller remembered his dad overhauling the tractor in the 1980s. It had a hitch for a big tool bar and pallet forks. They used to go from the orchard to the shed with a pallet of boxes of apples.”
Ryan’s friend, Tony Ramos, picked up the tractor and stored it for him. Meanwhile, back in Iowa, Ryan loaded his O-4 on the trailer and headed west. He picked up the OS-4 and showed both tractors at the California Antique Farm Equipment show in Tulare. “The whole thing was just 100 percent dumb luck,” he says.
Experimentals marked by innovation
The distinction between the experimental McCormick-Deering O-4 and the McCormick-Deering OS-4 is fairly simple. “The O-4 has the bat wing, cowl and full-coverage fenders. It’s a full-dress orchard,” Ryan says. “The OS-4 is more stripped down. It has no bat wings or full coverage fenders. They share the same hood and the same seating configuration. Otherwise, they are essentially identical.”
Live hydraulics is a significant part of the experimental aspect of the two tractors. “This was in 1947,” Ryan notes. “Live hydraulics did not come out on production tractors until the Super C in 1951. These were way ahead of their time.” The two experimentals are equipped with a live hydraulic pump, hard steel lines, hydraulic reservoir, dual-action valve and a hydraulic cylinder in the rear-mount lift hitch.
“The lift hitch was designed to accept a 2-inch square tool bar,” Ryan says. “You could set it at three different heights on the hitch. The hitch itself is also hydraulic and would raise up and down. If you didn’t want to use the hitch, you’d still have the standard drawbar with swing tongues so you could pull implements for orchard use.” The two experimentals’ hydraulic systems and hitches are identical.
Developing an electrical system
The other key part of the experimental design reflected International’s apparent attempt to develop its own electrical system. “In most tractors of this era, the ignition system – whether it’s a magneto or a distributor – is driven off a horizontal shaft out of a housing,” Ryan says.
“On the experimentals, the vertical shaft distributors go through the block and are driven off the cam, and the tag says Gas Power Engineering Department Tractor Works,” he adds. “It’s weird. At the time, Delco provided electrical systems to all of the major manufacturers. But on the experimental orchards, International used their own electrical parts. It must not have worked because they continued using Delco after that.”
Everything McCormick-Deering did with the experimental tractors was bolted on. “They didn’t modify the chassis, sheet metal, drive train, engine or axle,” Ryan says. “The engine in the 4 series is the same as the Farmall Super H. The experimentals’ hydraulic pumps do not have a drive mechanism on the back to drive a standard horizontal shaft, magneto or distributor. That’s why they all drive a vertical distributor.”
All of the sheet metal on the experimental O-4 is the same as on a production O-4, making it harder to distinguish between the two. “They all have same decals with ‘grove’ on the side,” Ryan says. “They literally bolted on some pieces and kicked ’em out the door.”
More questions than answers
In 1947, McCormick-Deering produced 50 O-4 and 50 OS-4 (Orchard Special) tractors, each with the suffix W1K after a hand-stamped serial number. Every experimental Ryan has seen that has a tag has that suffix. “Nobody understands why they built 100,” Ryan says. “It kind of seems like a lot. To me, ‘experimental’ would mean something produced in very small numbers. But a quantity of 100 suggests ‘post-experimental,’ almost ready for production.”
Of 100 experimental orchards built, nine are known to exist (two O-4 tractors, seven OS-4 tractors). “There’s an O-4 in Arkansas and an OS-4 in Iowa,” Ryan says, “and two turned up in non-orchard areas. Maybe they were World War II lottery tractors.”
The remaining seven were found in California. “The weird thing is, nobody has heard anything about experimental McCormick-Deering orchard tractors in Florida,” Ryan says, “where there were a lot of citrus orchards.”
Interestingly, McCormick-Deering did not build the experimentals all at once. “They were built in batches, here and there, over the course of several months in 1947,” Ryan says.
The standard-tread 4 Series (W-4, I-4, O-4, OS-4) started at 501, Ryan says, and have hand-stamped serial numbers. “None of the various models got their own serial number range,” he adds. “My O-4 is serial No. 17,603; my OS-4 is serial No. 14,339. Production-wise, between my experimentals, they built more than 3,000 4 Series tractors, and that helps explain the batched production of the experimental orchard tractors.”
Painted or not, they go
In addition to farming, Ryan works as a pipefitter and welder for Firestone. He’s also been known to do a bit of restoration work on the side. These days, he’s paring his International collection and adding a few big, early gas prairie tractors.
In his spare time, he gets his tractors out. “I’ve taken the O-4 on tractor rides,” he says. “With the exception of the 100,000th Farmall, which is a trailer queen, none of my stuff stays in. Painted or not, it goes to shows and parades and does field work. I’ve also taken tractors to plow days and used them in demonstrations.”
But it’s a safe bet that the O-4 and OS-4 aren’t going far. Scoring the rare pair is the kind of find most collectors can only dream about. “I’m the only kid on the block with bookend experimentals,” Ryan says. And he doesn’t seem much inclined to surrender that title anytime soon. FC
For more information: Ryan Peters, JR Farms, Maxwell, Iowa; suprchkn996@gmail.com.
Leslie C. McManus is the senior editor of Farm Collector. Contact her at Lmcmanus@ogdenpubs.com.
