I wanted to take a moment and tell you a little about myself and how my interest in four-wheel drive tractors began.  My name is Jesse Henderson, I grew up on my family’s farm near Oriska, North Dakota and like many farm kids, I loved all the farm machinery, especially the tractors.  

Like many of our neighbors, we had a Versatile and a John Deere.  The John Deere was a 7020 and my dad’s first four-wheel drive tractor.   It was common around home to see Versatiles, Steigers, John Deeres, and other four-wheel drives built by major manufacturers working in the fields.  There was, however, one farmer near Oriska that had a tractor that was a little more unique and his was yellow.  My dad told me it was an Erickson  “What’s an Erickson?” I asked.

Dad said they were built by a farmer named Roger Erickson, who lived near Tower City, just a few miles away, and he also manufactured and sold four-wheel drive tractors of his own design.  I thought that was pretty cool.  That farmer ran that tractor from the late ’70s until the early ’90s, right alongside newer John Deeres so it must have been built pretty well. 

When I was a teenager, I was looking at a book about tractors when my dad happened to see over my shoulder a picture of a 1930s early four-wheel-drive Massey Harris General Purpose, which was built with a steering front axle and not an articulated frame.  My dad said that it kind of looked like the one that Doug Bruns built in the 1960s.  My dad had known Mr. Bruns because he lived and farmed near my grandparents until he moved to Florida in the late ’60s.  My dad said that he was working in one of his fields when he noticed a strange-looking tractor in the field next to him.  He went over to investigate and discovered that it was built by Doug himself and my dad even got to ride on it for a couple of rounds.  My dad said that he thought it was built from two F-30 Farmall rear axles and a Buick car engine.  Almost immediately I began drawing my vision of what it must have looked like.  I think my dad regretted telling me about it because I must have asked him a million questions about it.  Then he told me that Doug started to build a second tractor but quit farming before he finished it.

 Then I had to know more. What happened to these tractors? I wanted to find out more, but my dad lost contact with Doug and didn’t know what happened to the tractors.  Over the last 25 years, I have stumbled on several more home-built four-wheel drive tractors. I finally decided that I need to start recording the histories of all of these incredible machines.  Designed and built by innovative mechanically minded farmers out of necessity to farm more land, or to be more efficient in their farming operation.  Sometimes they were built because the farmer couldn’t afford a manufactured tractor and sometimes it was because they couldn’t buy one that was big enough for their needs.

I have been able to talk to some of the family members of men that have built their own tractors and even a couple of the builders themselves. Unfortunately, many of the people that built them are no longer living, so it’s difficult to get all of the details. I hope to honor these incredible people by sharing their amazing achievements with other like-minded individuals.  I encourage anyone that knows of any person that has built their own tractor to let us know about it so that we can preserve this important part of farming history.