Easy row to hoe

Allis-Chalmers. International Harvester. Ford, John Deere, Massey Furguson and more: At Hanceville on Saturday, it didn’t matter what the label said — or, for that matter, if the label itself had given way to decades’ worth of rust and wear. So long as it ran, and so long as it still looked like a tractor, it was more than qualified to take part in the annual celebration of local agriculture’s rich mechanized history.

Clear skies and lots of nostalgia provided the atmosphere for the 24th annual Hanceville Antique Tractor & Engine Show, held Saturday on the campus at Wallace State Community College. One of the many regional stops on the busy north Alabama tractor enthusiasts’ circuit, the show transformed a corner of campus into a colorful pageant of colors, sounds, and even diesel-fumed smells from the past, as two-cylinder John Deere engines from the 1950s puttered right alongside Farmall Cubs and Ford 3000s.

With a pair of well-restored 1951 International Harvester Farmall tractors in tow — one a Cub, the other a heftier “C” model — Dennis and Teresa Johnson of Horton set up shop under their own shade tent with some John Deere-loving neighbors who’d also made the short trip down from Marshall County. Like many area tractor fans, plowing row crops isn’t part of their present-day life…but it remains a part of their shared history; the tractors themselves serving as living-memory artifacts of the daily rhythms of childhoods spent on the family farm.

“In my younger years, we row cropped,” explained Dennis, whose farm life these day centers on a medium-sized cattle operation. “When I was 4 or 5 years old, in fact, my daddy had probably some of the biggest farms in the county [Marshall County]. But as everyone grew up, it all started scaling back.”

Unlike a lot of themed events that rely on showing off your motorized pride and joy, the tractor show comes with nary an air of snobbery. Prize-winning restorations parade right alongside lovingly neglected rust traps that’ve never known a new coat of paint. All around, their owners are equally excited about the next guy’s used and abused stuff as they are about the spiffier, shiner, money-threshing showpieces.