Senior management at corporate IH Canada recognized the opportunity and decided to capitalize on it using the engineering and manufacturing expertise that existed at the company’s Hamilton, Ontario, facility. This resulted in the 1959 release and introduction of an “all Canadian” crawler series, which included a T4, T5 and TD5 at 26.3, 30.9 and 28.5 drawbar horsepower respectively.

Hamilton Engineering had previously demonstrated its ability to design self propelled machines with a line of SP windrowers, and its model 91 SP combine with planetary steering was also released about the same time. The idea of a Canadian crawler line did not generate a lot of enthusiasm with some parent company people and dealers in the United States, so a parallel development program in the U.S. resulted in the T340 development and release at about the same time.

The T340 gas and diesel models shared some components with the Canadian crawlers but had many differences. This reinforced the fact that the T4-T5-TD5 line was truly Canadian.

At IH, serial numbers generally started at 501.This was true with the T4 and T5 tractors. The T5 model with serial number 501 was sold to a dairy farmer near Perth, Ontario. His story appeared in the 1959 fall edition of Canadian Farming.

His reason for purchasing was two-fold, he said. He had some low land, which a crawler could handle in spring and fall. But the main reason was to keep his lane open for the daily milk truck in the winter. While we don’t know all of its story from 1959 to 2004, T5 501 was purchased in 2004 by the Richards family for their IH collection. It underwent a complete bolt-by-bolt restoration.

Running the crawlers

My first IH crawler experience was with a T4, which we had in stock during the summer and fall of 1959, at a company owned retail dealership in Carman, Man. I was there undergoing initial product training, which included steam cleaning used combines and keeping the used lot tidy (and anything else that no one wanted to do). The used equipment lot was on a leased railroad right of way, which was low and poorly drained so we needed the T4 to move machines around.

My next assignment during the winter of 1959-60 was as a Canadian crawler specialist, which meant I had a three-quarter ton pickup truck, a tandem trailer and a T5 with a blade going to dealerships demonstrating the outfit. I wasn’t a particularly skilful operator, but most of the potential customers were. For a “tractor guy” not long off the farm, this was a dream assignment. Logging operators were our main target in eastern Manitoba and western Ontario; and since we had dealers in places like Rainy River, Dryden, Lac Du Bonnet and Sprague, we had a good chance to sell several crawlers in those regions. Most of the prospects were small family logging outfits where the crawlers replaced horses — and some were treated as such.

I recall one old bachelor who had a big door into the kitchen where his TD5 spent the nights!

Our market share was good and the little tractors gave a good account for themselves. In the rocky areas we had an advantage in that our final drives were inside the track and, thus, protected. Our principal competitor’s were not, and welded drive housings were a fairly common sight on their machines.

During the early ’60s, the crawlers were part of a rapidly expanding industrial equipment product offering. While most of the sales were to individual operators, there was one notable exception. A peat-harvesting company became interested, as they needed low ground pressure but sufficient power to drive the vacuum cleaner-like machine which sucked up the surface of the peat bog and blew it into a trailing buggy. The regular T5 C135 engine was deemed a bit short, so 54 units were fitted with the higher horsepower C153 engine from a combine. They worked well and half went into a fleet near Whitemouth, Man. The other 27 went to New Brunswick.

Over the years the model evolved into the 500 Series with both a farm and industrial version built. A joint venture with Drott was a bonus as it provided access to an excellent loader line and the 4-in-1 bucket.

A log skidder version — the TC5 Series B Track Skidder was released in 1963. It bridged the transition from tracked to wheeled logging tractors. The 500C was succeeded by the 500E in 1974. It was produced at Hamilton until 1976.

All of this is history now and most of the surviving Canadian Crawlers exist in the hands of collectors. One of the most complete collections belongs to the Richards family of Barrie and Stouffville, Ontario, who regularly show the “first one” at vintage events.

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But the tracked concept was not forgotten, and in 1928 an experimental 10 to 20 track layer was developed. It was to be a T15 TracTracTor but only a limited pre-production number (50) were built before they were replaced by the T20 in 1930. The T20 was followed by a big 45 horsepower T40 in 1932. In the mid 1930s IH introduced diesel power with the TD35 crawler and WD40 wheel tractor. In 1939 a new and modern series of crawler tractors were introduced including the TD6, 9, 14 and 18 along with gas versions of the T6 and T9. A gas T14 was also available but few were sold and they were discontinued in 1946. This series was filled out in 1947 with the release of the 20-ton TD24.

The Second World War stopped the sale of farm crawlers but there was a great military demand. The U.S. Navy used IH tractors extensively, and after Pearl Harbor the Seebees (U.S. Navy Construction Branch) played a major part in reclaiming the Pacific islands. I had an uncle who operated a TD14 building advance air bases as the islands were captured. Apparently, the TD14 was the biggest crawler that could be carried by a Marine landing craft.

In Canada, the Commonwealth Air Training Program was established to train air crews from all corners of the British Commonwealth and required major airfield construction, including many places in Western Canada. After the war much of the equipment was sold, and some of the TD6s and 9s found their way to farms in the Red River Valley, where compaction caused by the weight and slippage of two-wheel drive tractors had come to be recognized as a major problem in the heavy clay gumbo. Most of our family farm was located on the shore of what had been Lake Agassiz so there wasn’t much gumbo but many of our neighbors to the west bought TD6s and TD9s to address compaction particularly in the spring. Service of these crawlers was a major part of the Dominion City IH dealer’s business.

Immediately after the war, under the provisions of the Marshall Plan, large quantities of equipment were sent to Europe for reconstruction. In Holland there was a depot to receive and assemble IH crawler tractors and a young Dutch mechanic named Herman Ballast was part of the crew. A bit later he and his family immigrated to Canada and he took a job with the local IH dealer. His diligence and work ethic (when Herman said he would be out in the morning he meant about 5:30) gained him a reputation and in a few years he bought the dealership, which he ran until retirement.

Another IH crawler story from Manitoba involved the Sigfusson family from Lundar, who developed a winter business hauling frozen fish from northern lakes, This grew into a large company who used IH crawlers exclusively to haul freight over 3,500 miles of winter roads in northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan and western Ontario. These roads were all built and maintained by Sigfusson Transportation with up to 400 employees. In the early days of the “cat trains” there was no communication and they were truly on their own their own to cope with weather, bad ice and maintenance.

The TD6s and 9s were all “open station” to allow operators a chance to jump clear before the tractor sank. Repairs were made by skill and ingenuity. One example, I recall, was when they lost a bearing on the transmission of a TD9, which was pulling a string of freight sleighs. They carved a bearing out of seasoned oak, boiled it in oil overnight, installed it the next morning and drove 200 miles to base.

Eventually the noisy, hot, dusty farm crawler business largely dried up. There was, however, a market developing for smaller, a lighter crawler for specialty applications. This resulted in many companies offering what are now called compact crawlers. International Harvester was no exception but decided to go one step further and build the line of small crawlers in Canada. I’ll share that story with you in a future issue of Grainews.

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The war created a serious shortage of farm manpower, which accelerated the demand for combines. But farm equipment companies were busy building war materials and were not allowed to devote resources to new products — although they were authorized to continue limited production of pre-war pull types (PT). An exception was granted to Massey Harris by the government in late 1943, when they were permitted enough steel to produce 500 model 21A self-propelled (SP) models in addition to their allocation of 1,300 PTs.

These 500 were to be built exclusively for the 1944 “Harvest Brigade” (a moving group of custom combiners harvesting across much of North America), which is a story in itself. The next year that number was increased to 750, so the market was still very much a PT business.

The PT market remained strong during the early post war period in the grain growing areas, but farmers in the corn belt were testing the idea of combines to harvest grain corn. Initially this did not affect the Canadian West, because there were no grain corn varieties grown there.

At that time on our family farm in southern Manitoba, we did grow corn for ensilage but, usually between August 25 and September 5 there would be a killing frost and the corn had to be foraged immediately before the leaves dried out. We harvested all of it with a one-row forage harvester.

Corn heads on SP combines really started to gain traction during the mid 1950s. At the same time, PT combines were changing to include sealed bearings, variable cylinder speed control (without changing sprockets), easily adjusted concaves and hydraulic header lifts.

At International Harvester the model 140 was released in 1954, and at the same time the IH tractors featured independent power take off and Torque Amplifier which allowed “on the go” ground speed control, making an efficient unit.

Self-propelled gains action

By 1959 when I started my career in the business at IH, the idea of SP combines for grain harvest was spreading on the Prairies and things were getting extremely competitive, with Massey and Cockshutt (plus CCIL selling re-branded Cockshutts) making major inroads. At IH, any time we could convince a customer of the economy of a PT combine and a new tractor it was good news, since our chances of a sale became much better. The key to this was often a demonstration.

These demonstrations were a real highlight for me as a not-long-off-the-farm boy. A new tractor and combine brought to the farm on a fine fall day were usually met with great hospitality. Most of the meals were excellent and reflected the farm tradition left over from the threshing crew days. However, we occasionally had a different experience.

My most vivid memory was of a noon meal provided by a gracious farm wife whose married daughter and her new baby were visiting. I was sitting at the right hand end of a rectangular table .The young mother was sitting to my right, not at the table. When it became necessary to change the baby, she did it right beside me. The next thing I knew the diaper was “sunny side up” on the table, right beside my plate. My experience with babies was very limited, so this almost caused another embarrassment.

Lunch was soon over and the action moved gratefully back to the field.

Tractors kept getting bigger and every few years IH and some competitors released larger PT combines to match them. By the late 1970s the PT market in North America was concentrated in Western Canada, with a few sold into the neighboring wheat-growing states. At IH we were getting a greater and greater share of a declining market. This prompted the decision to stay in the PT business to provide volume for the East Moline plant, which had capacity to build far more combines than the market for SPs could absorb.

With farm consolidation in full swing in Western Canada, many things were changing.

Effective weed control was common, new grain varieties were being developed with stronger stems to keep from lodging, making straight cutting more practical.

SP combines were capable of wider headers too, while pull types couldn’t handle them due to their offset design. And the change from auger to draper feeding meant more high-speed productivity.

There was also the less obvious, but very significant pride of owning a modern SP combine that trumped the slower economy and helped push SP sales higher.

In 1987 the last of the big pull-type combines, the Case IH 1682 was introduced. It was discontinued in 1991, ending another agricultural chapter in Western Canada.

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The Holt combine continued to evolve until sold to John Deere in 1936. (The brilliant inventor Benjamin Holt also pioneered early crawler tractors, and is the person behind today’s Caterpillar brand crawlers.) There was a Canadian Holt Company but there is no public record of their sales in Canada.

The harvester evolution began in earnest with the manpower shortage created by the First World War and got the attention of harvesting leaders like International Harvester. The experimental development of an IHC Harvester Thresher began with a horse drawn, ground drive, straight cut machine in 1913.

By 1915 the Deering Number 1 had taken shape and was available for sale. In the 1916 crop year, the McCormick Number 2, which featured the newly invented straw walkers, joined it. Both were nine-foot machines but could be extended to 12 feet if enough horses were available to power the “bull wheel” ground drive.

By 1925 tractor-drawn combines with engine drives were available, though horse hitches were still common. In the early 1930s power take off drives were featured and rubber tires were starting to appear, but due to the severe drought and depression of the “Dirty Thirties” there was limited demand in Western Canada. In 1935 a modern, new IHC Number 22 was introduced. There is a well-preserved example with PTO drive and rubber tires in the Country Heritage Park near Milton, Ontario.

The first on-farm

For many Canadian farms the first combine was a small, tractor-drawn, engine-powered four- to eight-foot machine, and the 1930s and early 1940s saw a proliferation of these. The most common were IH models 42- 52- 62-64, JD 12A-25-30, MH Clipper, Case A6, or AC Allcrop, but smaller companies like MM, Oliver, Cockshutt and Ford (Dearborn) also had entries as farmers decided to take full control of their grain harvesting and not rely on their turn in the threshing ring. The tractor driver could operate all of these small combines, and the limited capacity meant that small trucks and/or grain wagons could keep up.

Some western farms had bigger pull-type combines, which involved a second person to operate the combine from a raised platform overlooking the feeder house. This was often the “senior” person who carried over from being the stationary “thresher man.”

In Western Canada swathers and windrow pick up attachments were common to allow dry down of weed growth. Prairie farmers were also leaders in creating demand for larger combines such as the IH 31T or 31RD (spike tooth or rasp bar cylinder) or the JD-Holt-inspired 17 or 36B (gravity dump and front operator platform or auger and over the feeder house operator position).

In the case of our family farm in southern Manitoba, the first combine was a 1940 JD number 17 on steel wheels. It had a 16-foot header cut down to 12 feet and a drum pick up. A six-cylinder Hercules engine located over the single front wheel powered it. The exhaust pipe and clean air intake extended up past the front of the operator’s deck. The engine ran a bit better in the cool of evening, so the tractor driver could step up a half mile an hour, the grain rattled down from the clean grain elevator, the exhaust pipe glowed red and life was good. Getting ready in the morning was less fun with over 100 grease fittings plus chains to tighten and sometimes cylinder teeth to straighten. A 1948 model with rubber tires and a few sealed bearings replaced the old model 17.

The transition from threshing to combining was hard for many mixed farmers, who had beef cattle and were embracing the new “loose housing” concept. The idea of no straw stack to provide shelter in winter and no straw for the cows to munch on during long winter nights was cause for concern. This was the case on our farm, so my dad and the local blacksmith designed and built a conveyor system to replace the combine straw spreader. The straw was delivered to a trailer-mounted forage box, which took it to the cattle yard where it was blown into a pile with a portable blower made from that part of a salvage threshing machine. It was a lot of work but still far less than the threshing gang.

The 1940s and the Second World War saw the beginning of major changes to crop harvesting in Western Canada. I hope to share some of that story with you in a future issue of Grainews.

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Against this backdrop both Harvester and Deere decided to develop a really big tractor with all four wheels the same size. The result was the John Deere 8010 and the International Harvester 4300.

The 8010 was big by the standards of the time, with a 7.0 Litre Detroit Diesel engine developing 215 engine horsepower and delivering 150 at the drawbar. It weighed in at 19,700 pounds.

• PHOTO GALLERY: A look back at the IH 4300 tractor

The IH offering was bigger with a 13.4 Litre (817 cubic inch) turbocharged engine turning out 300 engine horsepower, Nebraska tested at 204 drawbar horses. It weighed 29,815 pounds and offered three steering options: front wheel steer, four wheel steer (with the front turning in the direction of travel and the rear turning the opposite way to provide full power turns) and, lastly, crab steering, where both sets of wheels turned the same way to hold on side hills. This was also meant to facilitate implement hookup and to escape getting mired in sloughs and wet spots.

The original plan was to produce 38 tractors, but ultimately 44 were built at the International Hough Plant in Libertyville, Illinois.

4300s in Manitoba

In the early 1960s I was the IH zone manager living in Killarney, Manitoba, with responsibility for the company’s farm equipment sales and dealers in that part of the province.

The 4300 tractors were first sold in 1961 and by 1963 there had been three sold in Canada — two on my territory. The first unit was sold by the Deloraine dealership Hainsworth Sales and Service to the owner of a large farm in the Medora area.

Remi Mosset was the farmer who bought it. He operated a 5,000 acre mixed farm and seed cleaning plant. Since the 4300 was new and very different, Remi wanted to see one in operation before buying. So we took him to visit the Kirschman Farm at Lemon, South Dakota. Kirschman happened to be a successful inventor and manufacturer of aftermarket fertilizer attachments for grain drills, as well as one of the first purchasers of a 4300 in the U.S. Remi was much impressed with what he saw; after a lot of negotiation, a deal was struck for the tractor and a IH 40-foot HD model 75 chisel plow.

Two things I particularly remember were the arrival and the settlement process. The tractor was shipped by rail flatcar — it was a full load and stuck out on both sides of the car. Many of the townspeople came out to watch the unloading. The 75 chisel plow was the only one ever sold in Canada, and it came unassembled by boxcar.

When Remi was ready to take delivery he paid the dealer with a combination of cash, milk cheques, grain cheques and miscellaneous cheques. We had a pile of money on the dealer’s desk which we had to count several times to get the same total twice.

The tractor was a huge success and was nicknamed “Crunch”, because it was supposedly able to pull anything not tied down. One story was the moving of a water tower —a D6 couldn’t move it, but “Crunch” did.

As was often the case with new products, there were a couple of hiccups. In the case of the 4300, it originally came with a standard gear transmission which had two problems. First, it got very hot under heavy, constant load and so did the operators feet. Second, the gears were large and very well balanced. So when the clutch was depressed they kept turning, making shifting harder and slower than normal.

This was resolved in the winter of 1962 when the tractor was shipped to Brandon to the International heavy duty truck shop where an Allison power shift was installed. This system used a torque converter to start the load but locked up when it got up to speed. It was great. The only other issue was a change of wheel rims to overcome possible failures due to weight and load. Both were done as company-paid field changes.

In late 1962 the International Harvester publication Canadian Farming ran an article about Remi and the 4300 for the spring 1963 edition.

I vividly recall when we were in the field with the 4300 they were working land which had been recently purchased. Much of Remi’s farm had been small holdings, which like everywhere in the Southern Prairies during the “dirty thirties” had topsoil piled up feet deep along the fence lines. He wanted large fields, which meant working up the old fence lines. He would be working at an eight to 10 inch depth with the chisel plow, but when it came to the fence lines the chisel plow went “to the frame.” The 4300 gave a puff of smoke when the governor opened up but didn’t change speed and made a sound that any tractor guy would love.

Remi Mosset has left this earth, but I recently came in contact with his grandson Patrick Mosset who farms in the Melita area. I found that the 4300 was traded in the late 1970s and was subsequently sold to a highway construction company to pull a large packer. Patrick eventually found the tractor in Kansas, owned by a collector who really didn’t want to sell it — but would for U.S.$185,000! It is still there, but Patrick did buy another one, which he sold last year for $84,000 — more modest but still many times the new Canadian price.

The other two Canadian 4300s were sold in 1962 and 1963.The first one was to Reid Farms from the Wawanesa, Manitoba, area and the last one to a farmer near Three Hills, Alberta. Although there were only 44 of these tractors sold, they set the stage for IH and others to develop four-wheel drive tractors.

At the time of this writing there are three 4300s still in Canada. One is with the original owner at Three Hills and another with a collector in the Calgary area. The third one is part of the outstanding IH collection owned by the Richards family of Barrie, Ontario.

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