Tractors in Fort Wayne and Allen County: Threshers, Dealers and Farm Mechanization

Tractors · The Farm Tractor in Fort Wayne and Allen County

Fort Wayne built trucks by the million and called some of them tractors, but in the record reached it never built a farm tractor — not on a production line, and not as a named prototype or one-off that any source stands behind. That negative, and how it was searched, leads this section. The machine itself still has a full local history. Its ancestor worked these farms as the steam traction engine and the threshing rig, and Fort Wayne built the rig's stationary half: the threshing machines of the Fort Wayne Agricultural Works. The gasoline tractor arrived in Allen County in the undocumented years before the first count found 795 of them on its farms in 1925; the published Census of Agriculture then tracks the takeover in hard numbers — 2,034 tractors in 1940, a peak of 4,670 in 1954 as the horse all but left the county's farms, and 2,803 in 2022 on a third as many farms, nearly three machines to every farm that reports one. The tractors were sold here by the implement houses of Columbia Street and, in the documented channel of a Supreme Court case, by International Harvester's Fort Wayne branch house — a selling branch for machines built at Rock Island and Louisville, in the same city where the company's plant built only trucks. And the machine gathered a culture: the Maumee Valley Antique Steam & Gas Association's shows, running since the 1950s; the pulls at the county fair and at Arcola; and the Fort Wayne Farm Show, the trade's annual marketplace since 1990.