Vintage Ford Tractors
   Robert N. Pripps
  1997 Voyageur Press, Inc. Stillwater MN USA
   ISBN: 0896583546


With Andrew Morland photographs, a collectors' bible of the history of one of the most famous, important & prolific makes of farm tractors in the world.

Styled as The Ultimate Tribute to Ford, Fordson, Ferguson, and New Holland Tractors this big book is filled with exquisitely clear photos & copies of manuals, advertisements & brochures. The flavors of the decades comes through as Robert Pripps' detailed narrative winds around the illustrations.

There has been only one short period in my life when I made the acquaintance of a farm tractor, 1954-8 in Herefordshire, England where I drove a tractor to spread the winter's muck-out. There was something engaging, eternal & deeply satisfying about handling what seemed to me, such a huge, noisy yet pliable thing.

I did prefer it to the two vast dray horses. The tractor never kicked nor dropped anything for me to step into! I was, therefore, tickled to read this quote: The new-fangled tractors will be the ruination of the farmer because they don't make no manure. A tractor non-believer's proverb, 1920s.

Before the dawn of the Fordson Tractor - a word, by the way, coined as far back as 1890 to represent the phrase - gasoline traction engine - most farming was in the hands of families, living in houses heated by a cast-iron stove, darktime lit by paraffin lamps & the telephone still some thirty years in the future. Into this world Ford's Model T automobile brought a new freedom & mobility. The idea to convert your auto into a farm machine, quickly became popular & conversion kits became available, one of which was from Sears & mudguards were, however, optional.

Robert Pripps has written an engrossing history of not only the Ford geniuses, he has reminded us of the origins of Motown & the people whose names we see daily & consider inseparable from the auto-industry.

As late as the 1930s, Harold Brock, Ford 9N designer, remembers that: Our competition was not other tractor brands. We felt our competition was the horse. It is the 1930s that influenced the now-classic styling of the new model called: Tractor of the Century.

Other books for tractor enthusiasts:
Vintage Farm Tractors by Ralph W. Sanders.
Vintage John Deere by Dave Arnold.
Vintage International Harvester Tractors by Ralph W. Sanders.
Vintage Case Tractors by Peter Letourneau
All available from Voyager Press.
(05/09/99)

Rebecca