Vintage Ford Tractors and Parts

Henry Ford’s first gas-powered tractor was actually a car, which Ford called the Automobile Plow and built during 1906 and ’07. Why was Ford focused on a tractor more than a year before the first Model T rolled off the assembly line? It may have to do with Ford’s childhood on his family’s farm in Dearborn, Michigan. There, Ford learned just how backbreaking farming could be. In this light, Ford’s interest in tractors was an attempt to make life on the farm just a little bit easier for subsequent generations of farmers. In fact, as soon as the Model T became popular, Ford wanted to begin production on a Ford tractor, but his company’s board of directors did not share Ford’s passion for farm equipment, which is why, in 1917, Ford formed a completely separate company, the Henry Ford & Son Corporation, to make tractors that would compete with those being turned out by International Harvester, Case, Allis-Chalmers, and John Deere. In the interim, though, other companies such as Staude, Smith, and Pullford offered attachments and specially designed wheels meant to convert any Ford Model T into a serviceable tractor, for about half the cost of a new one. Ford’s first tractor was the Fordson F, which was smaller than those sold by Ford's competitors, making it less expensive. The strategy worked: Within a decade, some 80 percent of all the tractors in use worldwide were Fordsons. Ford built his Fordson Fs in Dearborn and Cork, Ireland, which is where production began on the Fordson N in 1929. That tractor’s manufacture and assembly was moved to Dagenham, England, in 1933, but Ford’s reliance on overseas production caused his dominance of the U.S. market to weaken. By 1939, though, Ford tractors, beginning with the Fordson 9N, were once again being built in Dearborn.