This story is about love and loss and family, and a tractor.

A little tractor that helped the Amos G. Spade family of Paradise make a living on a 30-acre farm.

A tractor that bound a father with his children.

A tractor the family lost for 19 years, and then, amazingly, found.

Harry Spade of Leola has not farmed for decades, but his most prized possession is a 1957 John Deere 420 tractor.

The 60-year-old is not alone.

Old tractors are hot, even with the sluggish economy.

Collectors across the United States and in Europe — many who never milked a cow or planted a field — are paying soaring prices for tractors more than 40 years old.

Some early 20th century machines can sell for $100,000, up from about $10,000 a decade ago. Rarer models fetch even more.

The old tractors are restored, sometimes at great cost as parts can be hard to find. The tractors are driven in parades and tractor-pull contests and are displayed at antique shows.

None of all that matters to Harry, who owns his father's tractor purely for sentimental reasons.

He rarely takes its out of storage. It's enough to know it's there.

The tractor is more than a machine to him. It's a reminder of his parents, who died in the 1980s, and his life growing up with three brothers and eight sisters.

"Out raking hay with Daddy and running the combine," Harry said, wistfully. "It was our first brand-new tractor."

His father, Amos G. Spade, bought the two-cylinder tractor, a plow and cultivator for $3,270 on May 10, 1958. Harry keeps a copy of the sale bill like a birth certificate.

 

Wearing his John Deere shirt and hat, he recalled the day the tractor was delivered to the family farm on a flat-bed truck.

Its bright green and yellow body and various gauges lured the wide-eyed 9-year-old and his siblings like moths to a light.

They'd hop on the three-point hitch or a wheel axle for rides.

One day, Harry's father asked him, "You want to drive?"

Harry jumped into the seat and his father stood on the axle next to him.

"I wasn't allowed to touch anything but the steering wheel," Harry said.

He and his brothers made excuses to drive the tractor.

"I had a pickle patch," Harry's brother George, 62, of Quarryville said. "I'd say I was driving down to check the pickles."

The boys took off the tractor's muffler to better hear the engine clamor.

"Daddy would hear it and say, 'Them boys are at it again,'" Harry said.

The family used the tractor to help grow and harvest tobacco, wheat, hay and corn, and to aid in raising steers.

The five-speed, 25-horsepower tractor was perfect for planting tobacco, Harry said, because it went up and down hills at the same speed.

Harry can't talk about the tractor long without mentioning his father.

He taught his sons how to take parts of the tractor apart, and correctly put them back.

One time, his father heard that the tractor "had a slap" in its pistons, Harry said. The bearings on the crank were loose.

Harry's father knew a solution. The farmer/carpenter wrapped tobacco paper around the bearings and they worked like new again.

In 1975, the Spades' barn burned to the ground, but Harry's brother-in-law drove the John Deere out of the building before it was consumed.

Then Harry backed the tractor into the smoky barn again and quickly pulled out the family's hay baler while the firefighters' water rained down on him.

Then the tractor that was so much a part of the Spades' everyday life was lost.

Harry's father sold the John Deere at a public sale for $1,100 in 1978.

Harry and George and other members of the family later tinkered with fixing and restoring old tractors. They'd often do it together, talking while they tightened bolts and greased parts.

In the early 1990s, Harry began looking for his father's old John Deere.

He put an ad in the Lancaster Farming newspaper's Mailbox Market section asking if anyone had it.

Harry got no responses, but he didn't give up.

For five or six years, he scanned ads in the farm paper for John Deere 420s.

Plenty featured the popular model, but never the right tractor.

Finally, in 1997, Harry saw a John Deere 420 ad and called the seller, who lived in New York's Finger Lakes region.

He asked for the serial number on the tractor.

"112095."

"That was my dad's tractor," Harry told him, but the two didn't make a deal right away.

When Harry was ready to buy the tractor, the owner told him he had already sold it to his brother-in-law, a farmer who lived in Lancaster County, in Bowmansville.

Harry got his number and asked him if he would sell it.

Sure, but Harry only had a week to buy it. The farmer, and the tractor, were moving to Kentucky.

Harry bought back his family's old tractor for $2,100. It had steel wheels and wasn't in the best condition, but that could be corrected.

Harry, George and others in the Spade family contributed some of the 100 hours of work it took to restore the tractor. Harry, who works as an Amish taxi driver, spent about $1,300 for additional work the tractor needed.

It has been "stripped down" and has new transmission and rear engine seals. Also, a reupholstered seat, new tires and wheels, fresh paint — and a new muffler.

"It's back in the family," Harry said. "It's going to be going to my son when I kick the bucket."

If his son doesn't want it, then he must sell it to someone else in the family, Harry said.

"We'll try to keep it in the family from now on."

Harry heaved his leg up over the back of the tractor and settled into the seat. He pushed in the clutch and turned the key.

The John Deere 420 sputtered to life and took off down the road.



Staff writer Ryan Robinson can be reached at rrobinson@LNPnews.com or 481-6032.