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Before 1925, undocumented; the count, 1 January 1925
The gap, printed before the number: No documented "first tractor" for St. Joseph County was found — no press account of a first purchase, no dealer's first sale, no named farmer with a named machine, in the county histories, the directories, or the record assembled for this history. The gasoline tractor plainly arrived in the county in the 1910s, when Harvester's branch house was already signing "Oil Tractors" on its wall and Oliver was building a plant for Fordson plows; but the arrival itself left no dated trace in the record reached, and this section prints the absence rather than an invented pioneer. What the record gives instead is the first count.
The first count: The Census of Agriculture of 1925 — the first mid-decennial farm census, taken as of 1 January 1925 — counted tractors on farms county by county, in County Table II, item 52, on the farm schedule's own question, "Tractors on this farm — number." For St. Joseph County the count is 287 tractors. Indiana's total was 23,567. The urban county's figure is a small farmer's share of the state's — Allen County, Fort Wayne's county, counted 795 the same day, in a county of far more farms — and it is a count of machines, not of the farms reporting them, which the 1925 table does not split out. Two hundred eighty-seven machines, against the thousands of horses and mules that still did the county's field work: that is the documented size of the tractor in this county at its first counting, a generation after the machine existed and a decade into its sale here.
Sources:
- United States Census of Agriculture: 1925, Reports for States, with Statistics for Counties, Part I, The Northern States — Indiana, County Table II, item 52, "Tractors on farms": St. Joseph County 287; the State 23,567; the farm schedule's question ("Tractors on this farm — number") as printed in the volume's appendix.