A man and his machines

WALLSBURG — Even as a boy, Richard W. Erickson loved machines and was intrigued by the forces that powered them. He liked machines that went fast, but he also appreciated those that did hard work.

"I grew up in Minnesota. I grew up around a lot of farm equipment," he says, and he especially liked tractors.

He still does. He likes their looks. He likes their power. He likes what they do. He also looks at tractors and sees the shifting story of American agriculture.

"There was a farm on the border of Minnesota and North Dakota that was huge. They used 160 horses to pull their wagons, working in 80-horse shifts. Feeding the workers required a pig a day and a steer a week. They bought one of these," he says, referring to a 1918 Rumley OilPull tractor, "and it practically eliminated all those workers, all those horses." That's what power can do.

Erickson's tractor-collecting days started sometime back in the 1950s when he came across a 1918 Fordson tractor, which was sort of the Model-T of tractors: a small, economical machine that many farmers could afford.

Now Erickson has too many tractors to count, housed in buildings and scattered across the fields of his Wallsburg farm. John Deere, Waterloo Boy, Caterpillar, Harris, Titan — he has them all, in endless variations. He even has a 1908 Hart Parr, a behemoth tractor that is extremely rare these days. "I got it in Arizona, but it came out of Haver, Mont." It's easy to tell he likes that Hart Parr.

As impressive as the tractors are, however, they are only a small part of Erickson's collection of antique machinery, cars, trucks, motorcycles, buildings and other accoutrements. "I've been collecting things for 40 years — or longer, I guess. I got my first old motorcycle in 1956."

His collections will be on display at his annual Antique Power Show, which will be held this year on June 8-10 at his farm.

The show will include not only a lot of his machines, but also working demonstrations of such things as hay-baling, plowing, lath millwork, shingle millwork, blacksmithing and more. There will be parades of vintage cars and trucks, tractor pulls, fly-bys of vintage aircraft and stagecoach rides. There will be live musical entertainment (Erickson also plays the guitar) and food. There will be a swap meet, and other collectors are invited to bring things to display. You can even camp on the grounds.

Members of antique-car clubs, antique-tractor clubs and other machine clubs will be on hand to help and to answer questions. "It's the best antique show, by far, in the state," says Erickson proudly.