Scores Of Tractors Spring From "Little Hobby"

Scores Of Tractors Spring From "Little Hobby" TRACTORS Collectors 27-6-44 Stan Heiderscheidt, Centuria, Wis., and his brother CJ, Princeton, Minn., both took jobs in the city when they left the northwestern Wisconsin farm where they grew up. "Having been raised on the farm, we had to get out of the city on weekends a lot," Stan says. Often, they went camping in northern Minnesota. It was on one of these trips in the early 1970's that the Heiderscheidts found three old Deere H tractors for sale. They bought them, hauled them home, and restored one with parts from the other two. It wasn't long before they found another H and were able to use pieces they still had to put it back together. Stan says that was the beginning of their John Deere collection that now numbers about 90 tractors, plus a number of plows, discs and mowing machines. "We began buying, restoring and selling tractors. We did a lot of H's because we could sell them to people with small acreages or large lawns to mow," he continues. "We'd reinvest the money we made on the sales in more tractors. At that time, you could buy old tractors for next to nothing." Their collection today still includes one of their first H's. There's also a 630 Stan dug out of a creek near Rice Lake, Wisconsin that is significant mostly because of the amount of work it took to restore it. They also have a few tracked tractors, including a BO and an MO. "We have an early G and an unstyled B with a wide front end," he says. Nearly every year for the past decade, the Heiderscheidts have hauled all their tractors from storage buildings in Minnesota and Wisconsin to Stan's farm, where they're cleaned, checked out and put on display. Then they go back into storage again. Because storage space is at a premium, the collection is limited in size. And although the bulk of the collection is Deere, there are a few red and yellow Massey Harrises sprinkled through the sheds. While they continue to collect and restore, Stan says they've slowed down a little. "The better collectible tractors are mostly gone now, so we aren't able to buy as many as we could early on," he says. Still, he makes the rounds of farm auctions and machinery sales and even searches the internet looking for tractors. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Stan Heiderscheidt, 2020 180th Ave., Centuria, Wis. 54824 (ph 715 646-2186).

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