American Tractor

Excellent book that is a history, with photographs and specifications, The American Tractor. The Model T Ford had a four-cylinder engine that was rated at about 20 horsepower; in Mississippi I had a 1955 Ford 8N tractor that was rated at about 26 horsepower. It is said that you could still assemble an 8N from available parts for about $4,000, new it sold for about $750, I paid $1,000 for mine in 1982. I had to get Rip, a great farm mechanic, to come out to the house one time, in nearly ten years, to replace a fuel line. Rip had gone over the entire thing, steamed cleaned, and painted it, when I first got it. I loved that tractor and used it almost every day. It had PTO (Power Take-Off), so I could cut brush, drill post-holes, plow, cultivate. Quite safe on level ground, so everyone that visited wanted to drive it, and I'd use the free labor to cultivate new ground, or to drag firewood to the woodshed. I moved the entire print shop down to the new house, when I finally got it built, and I used to move the chicken house on a regular basis because chickens completely denude a piece of ground in a hurry (and they compact the soil) but I could move the house, disc the former plot, and plant tomatoes, which can stand very hot (nitrogen rich) soil. The chickens would could over, from their new location, and eat all the bugs. We had dozens of systems and sub-systems in Mississippi and lived on no money, none, until Samara was born and I built a couple of barns and houses for other people because we needed some actual cash flow. We produced a surplus, especially the first five years, because there was a land-contract with a single annual payment ($5,400) due in the fall. We made this nut by saving cash, it was a strictly cash economy, that we had saved selling milk and beer and various other things. I'd pay Joe Couch in cash, and he'd sign off, he never thought we'd make it and that he'd get the place back. Early, the fifth year, we paid the note off because I'd started to free-range pigs, letting them eat the acorn mast and I had 20 or so prime animals that sold at auction for over $100 each. Big Roy and I were making sausage, we made a lot of sausage, and when we'd locked orders for 100 pounds, we'd kill a pig, save the prime cuts, and turn everything else into sausage. We'd make a hundred dollars each, cash, and have excellent pork, and pork fat, and cracklings for several weeks. Roy was the resident butcher for the black section of Duck Hill, locally called Babylon, and he loved to call me to bring my tractor and cart over, to haul a dead animal. I was always the only white guy. We'd skin out a steer, and I'd cut it in half with an electric saw, carve out pieces which his wife and oldest kids would wrap and label. He had a meat band-saw on his back porch, which I thought was incredibly cool, and a meat grinder, and several freezers. We could process a lamb or deer in an hour. If we had a project that was going to take several hours, he'd start a pot of meat scraps cooking, throwing in potatoes, carrots and onions, a calf's head, pig lungs. His wife, Mary, had her hands full with kids and grand-kids, and I'd help her put them to sleep, reading stories, then we'd drink a little moonshine and tell lies around a fire. Mary would make a couple of large pones of cornbread and we'd eat "Slaughter Stew". We knew it would end, all things, as they say, and Colorado was the promised land, somewhere you could actually get dry after a shower. When I got up this morning, my desk was wet in condensed moisture. Where I rest my arm, and the body oil is thick, moisture collects on the surface; you can see this, it isn't an illusion. I just wipe it off with a paper towel and get down to business.