By Art Klassen – Portage la Prairie, Man.
A photo of a Fordson tractor in The Senior Paper reminded me of our Fordson tractors. In the early 1920s, my parents were living with their parents in Russia. Russia was having many problems due to war. One of them was lack of food in their own country.
There was a crop in the field, but all their horses were being used for war purposes. The crop couldn’t be harvested beacuse they had no tractors. In the United States, relatives of the starving Mennonites were sending relief parcels to Russia to feed the starving families. This was the start of the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Relief Fund.
A delegation was sent to Russia to gather information. The members decided that small tractors to replace the lack of horses would be helpful. Russia could harvest their crops and feed their starving people.
Back in the U.S., Henry Ford was contacted and asked if he could supply the MCC with a number of his little Fordson tractors for delivery to Russia. The answer came back that 90 of those tractors would be donated to MCC to help with the harvesting.
Gift was a godsend
This first private gift by Henry Ford of those tractors was a godsend. One of these tractors came to the village of Spat, where my folks lived. My dad and his brothers, as young men, helped to operate this tractor around the clock pulling a binder to help harvest the crop.
In 1925, my parents came to Canada. They got married and moved to Manitoba to farm. During that time, dad purchased an older Fordson tractor also and we used it to pull a rebuilt binder-swather too.
We purchased Ford’s new 8N tractors in 1948. It still resembled those first old Fordsons and it served very well until retirement. Ford tractors served two full generations of our family over some 90 years.
As a family, we also grew up with the Model-A Ford two-door 1929 family coupe car. In my lifetime of 84 years which also included ownership of a school bus fleet, there have been numerous Fords also that have served well.
