Belt Pulley Magazine - The Antique Tractor Restoration Hobby

The Antique Tractor Restoration Hobby

Although there have been local threshing shows throughout the midwestern United States for many years, the hobby of collecting and restoring old farm machinery began to boom in the 1980s. Organizations of collectors were formed and began to host annual shows for the public. As a result, public interest in old farm tractors and farm machinery grew phenomenally. One such organization that grew tremendously in the 1980s was the LeSueur County Pioneer Power Association of LeSueur, Minnesota. The interests of individual collectors naturally seemed to crystallize around particular makes of farm tractor, and clubs were formed by collectors of particular brands of tractor manufacturers. The Massey-Harris collectors, the John Deere collectors, and the International Harvester collectors each had their own national organization and newsletter. Accordingly, the magazine called Wild Harvest was dedicated to Massey-Harris tractors and farm machinery, Green magazine and Two Cylinder magazine were dedicated to John Deere tractors and Red Power was dedicated to International Harvester farm machinery. Because of the need for sufficient members to sustain a viable organization, these antique farm equipment organizations and their respective magazines, were limited only to the products of those farm equipment companies which happened to make farm tractors and, indeed, were further limited to only the major farm tractor manufacturing companies. Overlooked in the literature of the antique farm equipment literature were all the machines made by the various "short line" companies like the New Holland Machine Company of New Holland, Pennsylvania, the New Idea Spreader Company of Coldwater, Ohio, and the David Bradley Company of Kankakee, Illinois. No formal organizations existed even for those tractors manufactured by the many smaller companies. Into this environment was born the Belt Pulley magazine, with its professed goal, of being dedicated to "all brands of antique farm tractors."