The arrival: 795 tractors by the first count, and no "first tractor"

Before 1925 – 1 January 1925

The first, unnamed: No source reached names a first tractor in Allen County — no first machine, no first owner, and no first sale that any document stands behind, though the claim was searched for directly. The arrival is therefore printed as what it is in the record: a gap before a number. When the federal Census of Agriculture first counted, on 1 January 1925, Allen County's farms already held 795 tractors. The machines had arrived sometime in the undocumented years of the late 1910s and early 1920s, one farm at a time, and the county they arrived in held 4,038 farms. Statewide the same census counted 23,567 tractors on Indiana farms.

The owner-by-owner record that exists for other counties: The Chicago publisher Prairie Farmer issued its Reliable Directory of Farmers and Breeders for a run of Indiana counties in those years — Benton and Warren in 1919, Fountain, Parke, and Vermillion in 1920, Boone in 1920, Hancock in 1921 — and each carried a "Directory of Tractor Owners," naming the county's tractor owners and the makes they owned. No Allen County edition was found in the record reached: the Allen County Public Library's Genealogy Center, which holds the series, notes in its own guide to farm directories that residents of rural Allen County were instead listed in the back sections of the Fort Wayne city directories. The earliest tractor-by-tractor account of this county's adoption, if a copy survives, sits in the Genealogy Center's farm-directory holdings; in the published record reached, the arrival has a total and no names.

The moment, photographed: The Farms section carries the two Allen County photographs the Genealogical Society's archive captions for exactly this transition — one captioned, in the period's own words, that "the tractor plow has not yet superceded the horse," and one of a tractor working a double plow on the Heffelfinger farm. They are pointed to here and not retold: the overlap of horse and tractor, on a named Allen County farm, is the arrival's surviving picture.

Sources:

1. U.S. Census of Agriculture: 1925, Reports for States, with Statistics for Counties, Part I — Indiana County Table II, item 52: 795 tractors on farms in Allen County, 1 January 1925; item 55: 4,038 farms in the county; the state total of 23,567 tractors.
2. Prairie Farmer Publishing Company, Prairie Farmer's Reliable Directory of Farmers and Breeders — the Benton and Warren Counties edition (1919), Fountain, Parke, and Vermillion Counties (1920), Boone County (1920), and Hancock County (1921), each with its "Directory of Tractor Owners"; no Allen County edition found.
3. Allen County Public Library, Genealogy Center, "Farm Directories in The Genealogy Center" — the Prairie Farmer series described, and rural Allen County residents noted as listed in the back of older Fort Wayne city directories.
4. Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society / ACGSI agriculture photographs, as carried in Farms & Crops — "the tractor plow has not yet superceded the horse," and the tractor with double plow on the Heffelfinger farm.