Hog oilers used to go for about $1, maybe $5 tops.
People now pay from $150 to $1,000 for the squat, 100-pound, cast-iron contraptions like the red-and-green watermelon-shaped one Darrell and Carol Brubaker lugged 550 miles to show off in a kerosene-scented meadow near Des Moines earlier this month.
“It’s to keep your bacon from sticking to the pan!” the Kokomo, Ind., factory worker told a city slicker who eyed the Brubakers’ hog-oiler collection.
Grinning and shaking his wind-tousled, curly black hair, Brubaker, 56, then set the record straight about his oddly shaped clumps of iron: Once the farmer’s primary device for medicating hogs against the mange, the hog oiler now is merely an expensive farm curio.
It’s just one of the items associated with a dying way of life–family farming–that drew a passel of agricultural antiquarians like the Brubakers to a 200-acre grassy plot this month for what Des Moines-based Successful Farming magazine called the World’s Fair of Antique Farm Machinery.
The four-day event brought more than 55,000 spectators, 1,000 antique tractors, 50 hog-oilers and scores of seed-corn-sack collectors from around the U.S. and as far away as Germany to this tiny Des Moines suburb.
But the old-fashioned American-made tractor was the star. To these collectors, it’s clearly more than a rolling old hunk of iron.
The tractor, they believe, is a national technological treasure that helped the U.S. win World War II. Before the war, Minneapolis-Moline, a tractor-manufacturing company, built a Jeep-like vehicle for the Minneapolis National Guard. It was the prototype for the Jeeps it later built for the Defense Department. Tractors also were modified for clearing military air strips and other strategic areas.
Iowa was a fitting setting for the tractor convention. The first farm machine to be marketed as a “tractor” was manufactured by the Hart-Parr Co. of Charles City, Iowa, in 1907. The company merged with the Oliver Equipment Co. in 1929 and later went through several other ownership changes.
Old tractors vary in price from a rock-bottom $200 for a badly beat up model to as much as $100,000 for a rare model in mint condition. Spewing smells of wood, coal, kerosene and diesel oil as they rumbled through the meadow on parade, the antique tractors at the fair were valued at about $8 million.
Green and yellow, orange, fire-engine red, chrome and gray, the tractors gleamed in new coats of bright enamel that didn’t even exist in the ’20s and ’30s when they first rolled off an assembly line or out of a farmer’s shop.
Machines like the chrome Fordson, valued in the thousands of dollars, is to antique-tractor collecting as the Cord automobile is to antique-car collecting.
A ride back in time
Despite the work they put into restoring their tractors, collectors still have something of a love-hate relationship with the machines in general.
“With newer and bigger tractors, we worked more and more and made less and less,” said Dean White, 69, whose four children all declined to follow in their parents’ footsteps and maintain the 520-acre family farm in Shelby, Neb.
“But I’m just like everyone else here, reliving my childhood and looking at the machines I can no longer ride,” said White, as he ogled tractors, his eyes shaded from the sun by a red baseball hat from a farming cooperative.
He and his wife, Doris, 63, who hauled the grain on the couple’s farm, made the 300-plus-mile trip to spend just one day at the fair.
For the Whites, who own six antique tractors, the oldest a 1934 Allis-Chalmers model, collecting is more than a hobby.
“The antique tractors will appreciate more than money in a CD,” said White, who swapped all his working tractors for antiques. “And I won’t have to pay taxes on the tractors like I would have if I had sold them.”
The same thing that attracted Dean White to tractors as an investment–their rising value–has locked other old-tractor lovers out of the market. But the fair provided endless opportunities for tractor collector wannabes on a budget.
Something for everyone
There were dainty, white, cross-stitched T-shirts proclaiming, “I love my tractor,” as well as tractor soft-drink-can holders, tractor belt buckles, toy tractors, miniature tractors, tractors painted in water color, sketched in pen and ink, pinup posters of tractors, tractor refrigerator magnets, tractor kites, John Deere tractor earrings, tractor pins and tractor suspenders.
Then there were the lawn chairs, macramed in green and yellow with a John Deere tractor stitched into the back, that went for $65. For those with less money to spend there were $2.50 tractor bumper stickers. One read: “God Didn’t Make Everything Green and Yellow, Just the Best, John Deere.” Another read: “God Didn’t Make Everything Red, Just the Best, Farmall.”
And just as there are trading cards for baseball players, there are trading cards for tractors.
One farmer accosted a clerk selling this year’s $2-a-pack cards, demanding, “Don’t you have the first series?”
Told it was out of print, he shot back, “Well, print some more.”
Collectors of the real thing, like Ed Spiess, president of Dexton Inc., a Rock Island packaging firm, house their tractor collections on larger premises. Spiess has more than 50 antique tractors stored in his 168,000-square-foot Rock Island warehouse.
Spiess, 59, will not go after just any old John Deere. He says he’s attracted to the “lesser-known classic” tractors that rolled out of small regional factories just after World War II.
Photos of his latest acquisitions were pasted on a poster board in the middle of his tractor display. The board asked fairgoers who might know something about the tractors to step forward with information, making the rusty tractors look like lost children on a milk carton.
“They were what you call junk,” said Spiess, as he sat on a bale of straw in his stars-and-stripes T-shirt and matching baseball hat, reminiscing about his tractor trip to Port Huron, Mich., to pick up the two mystery tractors.
Spiess, who grew up on an 80-acre farm in Muscatine, Iowa, acknowledges that collecting antique tractors is not exactly like collecting, say, salt and pepper shakers. “But why on earth would anybody want to collect salt and pepper shakers?” he asked, his blue eyes twinkling as he smiled. “They are a dime a dozen.”
A part of their history
Most collectors either were farmers or have a farm somewhere in their background. They either own large garages, barns or warehouses, or have the money to rent them.
For these people, there’s more to tractor collecting than the joy of turning a piece of sputtering, rusting iron into a sleek machine that hums through a field.
“It’s the thrill of the chase,” said Tom Toycen, 40, an emergency nurse with University of Iowa AirCare, a helicopter-ambulance service. “You hear about some guy somewhere who’s got such-and-such old tractor and you just try to hunt it down.”
Toycen, an avid member of the Hart-Parr Oliver Collectors Association, has 10 tractors. “Some people collect doorknobs,” he said. “The world will never know why.”
The other joy about tractor collecting, said Toycen, is meeting the “down-to-earth people” who gather at the weekly regional tractor shows held around the country during the summer.
“Some of the best people on Earth collect tractors,” agreed Spiess. “Good farm people who have always worked for a living.”
They include people like Lloyd Bigler, 62, of Waverly, Iowa, a retired Northrup King Seeds district manager who grew up on a farm in Pottsville, Iowa.
“I’ve always been a farm-part nut,” Bigler said as he surveyed his collection of cast-iron tractor seats, owner’s manuals and miscellaneous tractor innards he was selling at the fair from the back of a trailer.
Bigler has six tractors, four of which he absolutely won’t part with. “Those will be sold at auction in front of the church while the minister is giving the sermon for my departure,” said Bigler, who wore blue jeans and a McCormick Farmall T-shirt as proof he was an International Harvester collector.
Even the Lutheran minister who delivered the homily at the Fellowship of Christian Farmers worship service on the fairgrounds Sunday morning was careful to establish his antique-tractor credibility with the group.
“Whenever a minister speaks before a group there’s always a question of what kind of credentials does he bring,” said Rev. Charles D. Borcherding, a tractor collector from Lincoln, Neb.
“I grew up on a farm in Southern Illinois, and my grandfather had a Fordson,” said Borcherding, 56, opening his sermon. “I remember my grandfather’s Fordson sitting there, emphasis on the sitting there,” he said as the collectors seated under a white vinyl tent burst out laughing.
“It was easier for him to use his team of horses to plow the field than it was to keep that Fordson running,” said Borcherding.
For some, corn is king
Antique-tractor collectors are a die-hard group, but they don’t have anything on the 250-member Corn Item Collectors Association Inc., which also showed off its wares at the fair.
Three-time president Curtis Norskog of Willmar, Minn., who has even written a history of hybrid seed corn in the U.S., displayed samples of his more than 100 metal hybrid-seed-corn signs, and 800 seed sacks, including a pair of rare sacks emblazoned with the logos of Chicago retail giants Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Montgomery Ward and Co. In the 1930s and 1940s, the two retailers sold seed corn out of their catalogs.
The group’s current president, Lloyd C. Mitchell, 63, wasn’t to be outdone. He showed off his corn-yellow Converse sneakers he bought at a flea market. “I call these my corn shoes,” Mitchell said. “I’d like to get an artist to paint little kernels on them.”
Mitchell’s collection, also on display, included seed sacks, teddy bears made from seed sacks, ceramic plates with corn farm scenes, corn watch fobs, corn pins, corn-cob shaped telephones, corn-cob shaped mailboxes, antique corn shellers dating from the late 1800s, a whiskey bottle in the shape of an ear of corn and a copy of the sheet music of “The Iowa Corn Song,” as played by the Za-Ga-Zig Temple All Shrine Band from Des Moines.
He denied his collection was, well, corny. “There’s so much history in corn, going back thousands of years,” said Mitchell, who lives in Peru, Ill. “Corn represents the stability of our culture. I mean, people have died for corn.”
About those hog oilers
Tell that to the hog-oiler collectors. Corn items may make interesting arcana they say, but the cast-iron, aluminum-and-cement hog-oilers are objets d’art.
In fact, hog-oilers may be more successful as conversation pieces than they were as instruments to help farmers control hog mange. Manufactured primarily in Illinois and Iowa (Peoria was a hog-oiler hotbed), the oilers had chains or rollers coated with coal tar, kerosene or crude oil that came off on the hogs’ skin as they lolled on the oilers. The only hitch was that the pigs had to have enough initiative to go up and rub themselves on the oilers.
Perhaps some exasperated farmer came up with the beige, torpedo-shaped hog-oiler with “Rub, Hog or Die” written on it.
“That one there’s for the literate hogs,” said Robert Coates, 50, an automotive machinist from Deerfield, Wis., who owns 130 hog-oilers with his wife, Louise, 49. Aside from the fair, their collection has been displayed at art museums in Madison and at the Universty of Northern Iowa.
“Aren’t they wonderful sculptures, just by themselves?” asked Coates, proving once again that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
