Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2023 i Farm Collector

In this issue, Howard Raymond reflects on the centennial of the Farmall tractor and its subsequent impact on American agriculture. This won’t come as much of a spoiler, but, as Howard notes, “With the Farmall, the mechanical horse had come to stay.” We’ve all read about the end of the horse-farming era, but most often it’s in the context of tractor development. Occasionally we encounter the remembrances of the men who held great affection for the horses they worked with on the farm. Less often do we hear about the trickle-down impact of the end of that era. Take the hay trolleys that captivate collector Bill Anderson (read about Bill in an article starting on Page 14). For at least 60 years after trolleys were invented in 1860, horses provided…

Sylvan Shirk, the son of Mary Grace and Laverne Shirk, Thorp, Wisconsin, is this month’s featured artist. Sylvan will receive a Farm Collector T-shirt: Congratulations, Sylvan! SYLVAN SHIRK AGE 13 Have a budding artist in your family? Send your kids’ or grandkids’ farm-related artwork to Farm Collector, and we’ll send a T-shirt to the monthly winner. Send submissions to Farm Collector, 1503 SW 42nd St., Topeka, KS 66609-1265. Please include the artist’s name, age and hometown and a recent photograph. A release form will be sent to the parents of each artist whose work is selected for publication; the release must be signed and returned to Farm Collector before the artist’s photo can be published. For more information, contact us at editor@farmcollector.com.…

William Davis began building gasoline engines in Waterloo, Iowa, during the 1890s. Cascaden Mfg. Co. took over the firm about 1903, although the company continued to use the Davis name. When William Galloway decided to get into the engine business in 1906, he opted to buy an established business and settled on Cascaden. The first Galloway engines were built by a Wisconsin firm, but beginning in 1908 they were built in the Waterloo factory. Galloway built its “Frostfree” line of water-cooled engines in sizes from 1-3/4 to 15hp along with a 1-3/4hp aircooled model. All engines were available as stationary or portable (on wheeled trucks) versions. Prices in 1913 ranged from $29.75 for a 1-3/4hp air-cooled to $439.50 for a 15hp portable. (Frostfree meant “… that in freezing weather every…

The very first use of the word “Farmall” was in the fall of 1919, the year my father was born. I asked my dad one time about his memories of life on the farm in Pennsylvania. He told me that he could not remember not having a tractor around. Fordson was king in those days and Granddad owned two of them. Dad said that they took as much water as kerosene (the water was hauled to the field in milk cans). Henry Ford began building the Fordson in 1917. It was a low-slung, unitframe tractor with worm gear drive that made it susceptible to rear tip-over. Fordsons were hot to operate (the heat from the rear housing would burn your legs) and most farmers complained that they were noisy and…

Some time back in letters to the editor in Farm Collector (January 2023, Page 5), a reader asked about a cast iron unit with places for test tubes in it. The unit is a centrifuge used, in this case, to test cream for butterfat content. The process involved putting a measured amount of cream in the tube with an acid to liquify everything but the butterfat. The tubes were then spun and the butterfat rose to the top, where it was measured as a percentage of the total sample. The process is referred to as the Babcock test and it is still in use today. With that in mind, let’s start with the cows. Brown Swiss and Jersey breeds, for example, produce milk with higher butterfat content. Conversely, Holsteins produce…

The genius of pioneer inventors can confound us. Countless contraptions that revolutionized farming in the 19th and early 20th centuries have become contemporary curiosities, or even mysteries. Here are six sent in by readers. Do you know what they are? Answers to the March 2023 items will appear in the May 2023 issue. Answers for new items in this issue must be received by March 13, 2023. MARCH MYSTERY TOOLS A. Piece stands 45 inches tall overall. The three-piece flared “paddle” end is 7 inches high, flaring to a 5-inch sideways fan from front to back flared pieces. Nail heads look very old. B. Roughly 18 of these were found in a deteriorated barn in east-central Nebraska dating to the 1920s. Each measures about 5-1/2 inches long. C. Tool measures 5-1/2 inches…

McCormick Harvesting Machine Co., Chicago, commissioned Calvert Litho. Co., Detroit and Chicago, to produce this very large (40-by-28-inch) chromolithograph advertising poster that was copyrighted in 1891 by McCormick Harvesting Co. In addition, markings on the lower right corner indicate that the image was “Copied by Permission from the Cyclorama of the Monitor and Merrimac on Exhibition at Toledo, Co.” The image depicts the first encounter of the ironclads 150 years ago and is titled “Terrific Engagement Between the Monitor and Merrimac at Hampton Roads, Va., March 9, 1862.” The text at the bottom reads: “This fight settled the fate of the ‘Wooden Walls’ of the world and taught all nations that the War-Ship of the future must be – like the McCormick Harvester – a Machine of Steel.” At the…

The Farm Collector Show Directory is the No. 1 source for the most current and complete show information. This guide has all the information you need for all the antique farm equipment shows in 2023. Each year, the directory features hundreds of pages of event listings and advertisements for tractor and engine shows, swap meets, auctions, threshing bees, and more than 1,000 events featured from coast to coast – and Canada! In addition, the 2023 Farm Collector Show Directory features our unique S.T.E.A.M Ranking Scale that helps categorize what each show will feature to help attendees choose which shows they want to attend! Wholesale pricing is also available for resellers. For wholesale prices and ordering, please contact a customer care representative at (866) 624-9388. Item #11758 $16.95 Promo code: MFCPANZ2 The…

William Galloway was a big name (at least in the Midwest) in the farm implement field during the first two decades of the 20th century. Galloway was born in 1878 on a farm near Berlin, Iowa, attended local public schools and studied at Monmouth College in Illinois. He began his career by traveling from farm to farm, selling notions and specialty items from his buggy, before going to work for an implement dealer at Reinbeck, Iowa. Eventually Galloway became a traveling salesman for implements and farm equipment, learning the machinery business from the ground up. Galloway moved to Waterloo, Iowa, in 1901, and started a farm implement dealership selling (as was common at the time) many lines of machinery and vehicles. But his goal was to build his own machinery and…

I’m one of those people who tends to think that life was better back in the days when things were simpler, but just sometimes I have to admit that modern life, and the internet in particular, has opened doors for me that would otherwise not have existed. For instance, without the internet, I doubt that I would have found this magazine, and I would certainly not have emailed the editor, Leslie, to ask if I could write some articles in her publication. Without the internet, neither would I have received an email from a reader called Donny Denfeld, who had read one of my articles on British tractors, and had a few questions to ask me about the sort of tractors that we collect here in the U.K. By the…