Tractors

This board holds the pictures gathered for Tractors, one of the books in James Lantos's Pictorial America series of illustrated histories. The tractor did more to change daily life on the American farm than almost any other machine, and the change took place within a single lifetime.

Before the tractor, farm power came from horses, mules and people. In the late 1800s large farms began using steam traction engines, huge iron machines that burned coal or wood and were used mostly to drive threshing machines at harvest. They were heavy, slow, and liable to sink in soft ground or start fires in dry fields.

The gasoline tractor came next. John Froelich built one in Iowa in 1892, and by the early 1900s several companies were selling them. The Hart-Parr company of Charles City, Iowa, is often credited with popularizing the word tractor. These early machines were still big and costly. The real turning point came in 1917, when Henry Ford began selling the Fordson, a small, cheap tractor built on an assembly line. International Harvester answered in the 1920s with the Farmall, which could work between rows of crops as well as pull a plow. In the 1930s rubber tires replaced steel wheels, which made tractors faster and smoother.

The change was not painless. As tractors spread, farms grew larger and fewer people were needed to work them. During the 1930s government photographers recorded tenant farmers in the South and on the Plains who had been pushed off the land as owners switched to machines.

The pictures here show steam engines at threshing time, early tractors pulling plows across open prairie, farmers posing proudly with new machines, and advertisements from the companies that built them. Look for the horses. In many of these pictures they still stand nearby, because for years most farms used both, and the old way and the new worked side by side.