Tractors in South Bend and St. Joseph County

Tractors · The Farm Tractor in South Bend and St. Joseph County

South Bend is the plow city that also built tractors — twice over, in two different senses of the word. In the 1920s the Oliver Chilled Plow Works, the largest plow factory in the world, experimented with a tractor of its own and built about twenty of them before the 1929 merger folded the design into the Oliver line — whose tractors were then built in Iowa, not here, for the next forty-seven years. A generation later a father and son in a two-car garage founded Wheel Horse, and South Bend built garden tractors by the tens of thousands from 1946 until Toro bought the company in 1986. Around those two building stories stands the rest of the record: the plow works' tractor-age implement course, including a plant built to make plows for Ford's Fordson; International Harvester's South Bend branch house, which sold the tractors this city did not make; a county farm fleet the census counted at 287 machines in 1925, at a peak of 3,441 in 1959, and at 1,560 in 2022; and a pulling tradition at the county fair that runs from the Lakeville Lions' annual pull of the 1950s and 1960s to the sanctioned pulls on the fair's schedule today. The manufacture test leads, because in this city — unlike Fort Wayne, the first city of this history, whose tractor record is a documented negative — the test has something to answer for.