Two Cylinder Magazine

The John Deere “AR”
A Story Of The Transition From Horses To Tractors
by Howard Anderson

The author (left), 1-1/2 years old and Ray,
2-1/2 years old.

Dad unhitched Dick and Florrie, a closely matched pair of large dapple-gray Percheron workhorses, from the four-runner sleigh he used for hauling manure, hay, and corn bundles in the winter time. Dad lifted me onto Florrie’s back and handed the driving reins to Ray. Ray and I were also a closely matched pair (of brothers) that were yet too young to go to school.

The horses walked slowly across the packed snow to the barn door, harnesses jingling. Ray, feeling important, believed he was driving the horses as he held tightly to the dangling leather reins. Of course, we know now that the horses would have taken the same path to the barn door even if Dad had laid the reins on the ground. Ray could have ridden on the back of the other horse if he had wanted to, but already at about the age of four he had learned that he would rather drive than ride. That was more than sixty years ago, and Ray would still rather drive than ride. Some things change — some don’t.

The back of the horse was so wide, my short little legs stuck almost straight out on each side. I remember those horseback rides so clearly… I liked the smell of the horses, the squeaking of the harnesses as the horses walked, and the jingling when the horses would shake their heads. I was too young to remember my first ride on the back of a horse, but it certainly must have been on the back of Dick or Florrie.

In the summertime, when we were older, Ray and I would pour a small amount of oats on the ground. When Dick and Florrie put their heads down to eat the oats, Ray and I would wrap our arms and legs around the necks of the horses and wait for them to lift their heads up so we could slide down onto their backs. We would slap the horses on the rump with our hands and nudge them in the ribs with our feet to get them to move about the pasture. The horses were fitted with halters, but no bridles, so we had no way to guide them. We had to be content to go where Dick and Florrie chose to take us.

Ray, Howard, and Marilyn Anderson (seated) with Maude.

By the mid-1940s, Dad was doing most of the farm work with tractors, but he kept this one pair of horses to do winter barn chores. On a typical winter day, Dad would clean the barn; loading the manure onto a four-runner sleigh, after which the horses would pull the sleigh into the pasture. As Dick and Florrie walked along slowly through the pasture, Dad would fork the manure onto the ground. After unloading the manure, he would often haul a load of hay or corn bundles from the field to the barn. When Ray and I went with Dad to haul corn, we liked to try to catch mice that ran out from under the corn shocks. We would take the mice back to the barn and feed them to the barn cats.

Dad also used the horses for corn planting and cultivating, as well as for mowing, raking, and pulling a hay wagon in the summertime. The corn and haying duties could have easily been done with tractors, but I think he used the horses for a number of reasons, one of which would have been nostalgic; Dick and Florrie had been on the farm since their birth. Maybe Dad wanted to exercise the horses and keep them accustomed to the hitch over the summer months. He was able to operate the horse-drawn equipment alone if they were pulled by horses; using a tractor would have required two people to operate the equipment. Besides, horses were quieter than tractors. Tractors and farm equipment were difficult to acquire during the war; it was a time when farmers had to often be content with what they had.

I don’t remember what happened to Dick and Florrie. Maybe they died or became too old and sick to work. Ray said he remembers the dead animal service coming to the farm. We faintly remember one of the horses becoming sick after getting into the bin of ground oats. Whatever happened to them, I am certain Dad was very sad to see them go just as he had been when other teams of horses, such as Babe and Duke, either became too old or lame to continue working on the farm.

Harry Anderson with Babe and Duke.

After Dick and Florrie were gone, Dad tried doing winter barn chores with a tractor. He had purchased a new 1951 “AR” and stored it in the granary drive-through. The “AR” started and ran well, but there was too much snow that winter resulting in too many places he couldn’t go with the tractor. The “AR” was probably not a good choice for winter barn chores because of the tractor’s low clearance. Ray and I suspect Dad originally purchased it because he knew we would soon begin to drive the tractors in the fields, and he likely believed the “A” Standard was safer for a beginner than a row-crop tractor.

The following summer, Dad purchased a younger team of horses. This new team of brown horses, named Maude and Millie, were smaller than Dick and Florrie, but they were large enough to handle the winter barn chores. Dad got them from a man near Bemidji, Minnesota, which was about 100 miles from our farm.

I was invited to ride along with Dad in the nearly new red Dodge truck on the day he went to haul the horses home. He and I both changed into clean overalls and gave Mom a kiss goodbye. Dad lit a YB cigar, and we were off on our journey. I didn’t often get to go alone with him, especially on such a long trip. Ray stayed home that day to work summer fallow land with Gordon, the hired hand. I think Ray would liked to have gone along, but he was content to be the operator of the “AR” Tractor and 11-foot John Deere “CC” Field Cultivator.

When Dad first acquired the new team of horses, we all had a little trouble accepting a horse name Maude. That was our paternal grandmother’s name, and it just didn’t seem right to call the horse Maude. But, we always called our grandmother “Grandma,” so we just tried not to think about the two of them having the same name.

Maude and Millie had not only been trained to pull, but also to ride. They came complete with harnesses and bridles, but no saddles. Dad later acquired

a saddle we could use, but we often didn’t take the effort or time to use it. At the ages of 10 and 11, Ray and I were pretty excited about having horses we could not only ride, but also horses that would go in the direction we wanted them to go. Well, most of the time anyway. Maude and Millie were extremely independent.

Dad didn’t want us to ride the horses outside of the pasture. We often bridled the horses and rode them a half-mile north through the pasture to the little town of Keywest, Minnesota, where our friends Calvin and Bobby lived. For some reason the horses didn’t like to go to Keywest. We had to coax and urge them along. The horses kept turning to go back to the farm, so the trip usually followed a path of small circles in the pasture before we arrived at the church yard on the edge of Keywest. We would tie the horses to fence posts and go play with our friends.

When it came time to return home, we would climb onto the horses and have Calvin and Bobby hand us the reins. As soon as the horses were freed from their bondage to the fence posts, and we headed them south, they would run at full speed for the half-mile return to the farmyard. There was no stopping and no steering the horses. I always rode Millie; Ray rode Maude.

Millie was slightly larger and faster than Maude, and we assumed younger. We thought that any horse having the same name as our grandma Maude had to be the older horse. Besides, our friend Bobby had a sister named Millie, and his sister was many years younger than our grandmother.

Harry Anderson with his son, Ronald.

The horses would start out galloping together but, as Millie began to pull ahead of Maude, Maude would reach out and bite Millie on the rump, causing Millie to start bucking and running more slowly. I had difficulty staying on the horse’s back because of the bucking, and Ray always thought it was funny. Maude would catch up for awhile until Millie regained her gait and pull ahead again; then the whole process of biting and bucking would begin again until Millie could finally pull away from the reach of Maude’s teeth. As the horses rounded the bend and entered the farmyard, Millie would still be running full speed, She wouldn’t slow down or attempt to stop until she slid right up to the barn door. I always had the fear that someone would leave the barn door open and Millie would run right in, peeling me off her back on the way.

The first summer we had the riding horses was the last summer Dad hired a farm hand to help with the farm work. After that summer, Ray and I were willing and able to do the tasks the hired help had been doing. But, that last summer, Gordon Benson of Bagley, Minnesota, came to work on the farm just before the spring planting and he stayed until after the fall harvest. Gordon, a respected farm worker, was young, strong, and an experienced horse rider.

One evening after supper, Gordon put the bridles on the horses. He and Ray rode the horses through the pasture to Keywest, while I rode my bicycle over there on the county road. This time Gordon opened the gate at the church yard so he and Ray could ride the horses into Keywest. After a short ride around the village they started for home. Gordon, riding on Millie, gave her the reins for a high speed gallop on the road leading to the farm.

There was one problem that Ray and I and the horses all anticipated, but Gordon didn’t, and we didn’t think to warn him until it was too late. When Millie reached the churchyard driveway, she made a sharp left turn to go back into the pasture, which was her usual route home. Gordon expected the horse to continue straight ahead on the county road. So, Millie turned left and Gordon went pretty much straight ahead — right into the county drainage ditch.

Gordon wasn’t hurt, except for his pride, but he wasn’t happy as he crawled out of the ditch. Millie ran through the open pasture gate by the church, through the pasture, around the bend, into the barnyard, and slid up to the closed barn door. Ray and Maude followed closely behind the riderless Millie. Gordon walked home on the county road; I rode next to him on my bicycle, biting my lips, looking the other way and doing anything I could think of to keep from laughing. Later, Gordon would appreciate the humor of that event, but not right then.

Gordon wasn’t the only person to be upset with one of the horses. One warm summer day, our cousin, Jeanette, came to our house with her mother, our aunt Alvia, for a visit. I bridled the horses so Jeanette and I could go riding. I held the reins as

Jeanette stood on the edge of the stock watering tank so she could climb onto Maude’s back. Dad had tied the ends of the reins together so we wouldn’t drop them on the ground. After Jeanette was on the horse, I threw the reins over Maude’s head, accidentally spooking the horse and causing her to lurch forward. Jeanette slid off the back of the horse and landed in a very fresh cow pie by the stock tank. Like Gordon, Jeanette didn’t suffer from physical injury, but it frightened her and she was very angry.

After a few years, Dad sold all the cattle because the barn was in such poor condition, and because the farm land he used for pasture,

hay, and corn had become more valuable for other crops. Ray and I had both acquired driver’s licenses by this time, and we had become more interested in cars than in horses and bicycles. Maude and Millie were sold, but we still had the “AR” that Dad bought, upon which Ray and I first learned to drive a tractor while doing field work.

Fifty years later, Ron, our younger brother, thought he would like to have a nicely restored “AR.” Ray found one that had been in a museum. The sheet metal was excellent, but the engine was stuck. We ended up having to do extensive work on the tractor, and this was going to be his opportunity to be involved in tractor restoration with his “big” brothers. However, after a few hours of scraping, wire-brushing, and twisting off rusted bolts, Ron went off to play golf; an activity he enjoyed much more.

Ray and I completed the restoration, while Ron’s wife, Rose, wrote the checks for parts and machine work that was needed, so Ray and I decided the tractor was more Rose’s than it was Ron’s. But, she didn’t write the checks without doing a fair amount of grumbling about the cost of restoring the tractor. One time, shortly after she had paid a large bill, we sent her a final bill of $50 for “tire air and valve caps.” She called us a “pair of bandits,” immediately seeing the ruse of the bill, and refused to send us any more money.

Rose has visited the farm since the restoration was completed, and we know she has had fun driving it around the farmyard. Rose and Ron’s “AR” serves as a strong reminder of the tractor our dad owned.

Dad had purchased his first tractor in 1929, a 10-20 McCormick-Deering. He had sold his last horses, Maude and Millie, in 1957. Although Dad’s new “AR” in 1951 had failed the attempt to do winter barn chores in northern Minnesota, it had been a part of the final link in the transition from horses to tractors. Our grandfather, John Anderson, had farmed only with horses. My brother, Ray, never farmed with horses. Dad (Harry) had begun farming in the early 1920s without tractors; farm work was done only with horses. He retired from farming in the early 1960s without horses; the farm work was done only with tractors. Our family’s transition from horses to tractors was complete.

The author, plowing with Ron and Rose Anderson’s 1953 Model “AR” at the East Grand Forks Heritage Days celebration.