The culture: pulls at the fair, and no plowing contest

1944 – present

The pull's documented start here: The St. Joseph County 4-H Fair's own history — its moves from North Liberty to Lakeville in 1935, to Playland Park in South Bend in 1946, and to the Ironwood Drive grounds it occupies now — belongs to the Farms & Crops record. The tractor's place in it is documented by the fair's own sponsors. The Lakeville Lions Club, which took over sponsorship of the fair in 1944 and ran its food booth from that year, records in its club history, in one sentence, the start of the pulling tradition in this county: "In the 50's and 60's, we sponsored an annual tractor pull." The farm tractor, a decade past its takeover of the county's fields, had become a sport in the county seat's fair, pulling a weighted sled before a crowd — the documented beginning, printed at its true size, of a tradition that has never since left the fair's program.

The modern fair: The fair's schedules in the South Bend Tribune's coverage of the 2001 fair — the grounds at 5117 South Ironwood Drive — list both ends of the sport on the same day's program: a garden tractor pull at noon, the small machines of this city's own manufacture pulling in their own class, and a National Tractor Pullers Association truck and tractor pull in the evening program. Current fair listings carry antique tractor pulls and parades among the fair's standing attractions, and the county's spring Agricultural Days — among the largest indoor farm-education events in northern Indiana, on AgriNews' account of April 2024 — run a pedal tractor pull for children. The culture the machine gathered here is unbroken from the Lions' annual pull to the present fair; it is also, in the garden class, a culture of a machine this city built.

The plowing contest test, negative: The tractor age's other great field sport, the plowing contest — matches in which tractors and teams turned judged furrows, up to the national plowing matches — has no documented St. Joseph County instance in the record reached: no county plowing match, and no national or state match seated here, appears in the county's histories, its fair record, or the press assembled for this history. Indiana's documented plowing-contest history belongs to other counties (the Harvester company's own photographic record, for instance, documents its exhibit at a Wabash plowing contest — Wabash County, not this one, and printed here only so the boundary is not mistaken). The absence is printed at its true size: in this county the tractor's documented field culture is the pull, not the plowing match.

Sources:

1. Lakeville Lions Club, club history (Lions e-Clubhouse) — the 4-H Fair at Lakeville from 1935, the club's sponsorship from 1944, the move to Playland Park in 1946, and the sentence quoted: "In the 50's and 60's, we sponsored an annual tractor pull."
2. South Bend Tribune, St. Joseph County 4-H Fair coverage and schedules, 2001 — the garden tractor pull and the NTPA truck and tractor pull on the fair's program; the fairgrounds at 5117 South Ironwood Drive.
3. St. Joseph County 4-H Fair, current listings — antique tractor pulls and parades among the fair's attractions.
4. AgriNews, 23 April 2024 — St. Joseph County Ag Days (5–7 April 2024), its pedal tractor pull, and Clay Geyer's account of the event.
5. The plowing-contest negative — stated from the searches named in the threshold entry; the Wabash contest reference is to the Wisconsin Historical Society's International Harvester photograph record, printed as a boundary only.