In 1880 John Charter invented the first liquid fuel tractor made in Sterling, Illinois, by the Charter Gas Engine Company. This new invention was lighter and better for field work than existing implements. Charter's so-called tractor eventually had a powerful social and economic influence on rural life in Illinois.

At first the new device's influence spread slowly. By 1910 only 1,000 tractors had been produced, but by 1970 nearly five million were in operation. Falling prices enabled part of this expansion. On January 27, 1920, the price of the tractor dropped from an average of $785 to $650. By February 1922, the average tractor cost only $395.

By 1915 fourteen Illinois tractor companies had opened shop. They included Charter Gas Engine Company of Sterling, Caterpillar, Stover Engine Works, C. L. Best, Holt, Temple Pump, Electric Wheel, Avery, Fairbanks Morse & Company, John Deere, Petro Hall, Emerson-Brantingham Implements, Joliet Oil Tractors, and Hume. From the original thirty-five Illinois companies, only John Deere and Caterpillar (from the merger of C. L. Best and Holt) survived.

Tractor advertisements used slogans that made farmers think they were buying a "horse-like tractor," not a machine. Pullford Co. advertised "Make your Ford do the work of 2 or 3 horses." John Deere advertised that a farmer could plow twenty acres with a John Deere plow. Moline Plow Co. claimed "One Man Can Plow More Land . . ." Advance Rumely stated, "It's Just Like Handling a Horse Gang." The companies never criticized the horse.

The farmer took both sides. Edwin Belin, a retired farmer of Winnebago County, remembers when his father bought his first tractor for $500. When the John Deere was delivered the neighbors came to see it. They claimed it was "quite a thing . . ."

Dorothy Bell Belin, daughter and wife of farmers, remembers when her father first bought his tractor for $1000. It was a Farmall, and her father had the support of her mother for this purchase. Bell did not sell his horses but kept them and bought more. Farming was easier with the tractor, but "it cost money to operate. You had to buy the gasoline. That was a problem."

World Wars I and II brought an increase in the number of tractors. During World War I, the government actually used many horses. Out of necessity, farmers had to use tractors. After the war, export demand decreased and often resulted in farm bankruptcy.

The increase of tractors brought social changes. Farm population in the United States dropped as the number of tractors grew. The key decade was the 1940s. At the start of the war, 6.8 million families and 30 million people lived on farms, and there were 1.2 million tractors. By 1950, the number of tractors had climbed to almost 4 million. The number of people on farms had fallen to just over 23 million. Overall, there was a strong inverse relationship between the number of tractors and the number of people living on farms. Demographics in Illinois followed the national trend, though not as dramatically. Nevertheless, from 1930 to 1950 tractor usage steadily increased while the rural population steadily fell.

The shift from horsepower to tractor power increased, too. The use of horses dominated until the tractor gained dominance about 1940. After

These two graphs illustrate the increased use of tractors even as rural population declined. (Graphs courtesy Anna Carlson)

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The number of farms in the U.S. and Illinois fell as tractors replaced horses and rising equipment costs forced the owners of small farms out of business. (Graphs courtesy Anna Carlson)

1940 the number of larger farms increased, replacing the smaller farms. A farmer could not own just one tractor. Farmers came to rely on several tractors.

As the tractor replaced human and horse labor, the size of farms increased, resulting in fewer farms. The number of farms rose during the late 1800s. But after 1900, there was a distinct decrease of farms, with a sharp decline after 1940, the year the tractor took over.

Farmers began to find it difficult to earn a living on the small farms. Farmers and their wives began to look for jobs off their farms. They could no longer run a small farm and stay in business. In 1910 there were slightly more than a million farms smaller than twenty acres, and twenty thousand that were larger than five hundred acres. By the 1990s, however, there were hardly any farms smaller than twenty acres. Farmers often had no market, and, when they did, they did not earn enough. Prices were sufficient to support only the larger farms.

While large cooperative farms succeeded, other farms suffered from these changes. In 1938 the government created the Agricultural Adjustment Act to increase the size of payment on small family-farm operations. But this help often had no effect.

Another agricultural depression occurred in the 1980s. In that decade one out of every four rural children was poor, and one-third of all farm families lived in poverty. In 1980 forty-five percent of the farmers' income went to paying off farm debt. In 1971 fifty billion dollars had been collected in farmers' debt. By 1986 that number rose to two hundred billion.

Communities changed as a result. Fewer farmers shopped in local stores and those who did were too few in number to keep stores open. Many small towns died, causing people to move to suburbs and cities. In the 1980s Mike Jacobsen reported that for every five to seven farms that failed, one business in a small town went bankrupt.

The sense of rural community diminished. Before the tractor was popular, threshing rings traveled the neighborhood. The efficient tractor pushed aside these older forms of cooperation. As farms grew larger, the farm population decreased. Because the farms used less family help, smaller farm families resulted.

The tractor brought benefits to the farm. It was efficient. The tractor was modern compared to the horse. The farmer-owner did not have to pay as many hired men. There was more leisure time. But the tractor changed the social structure of rural life. The key position that farming held in American life vanished.—[From student historian's interview with Dorothy Bell Belin, Feb. 23, 1996; student historian's interview with Edwin C. Belin, Jan. 3, 1999; Better Farming with John Deere Quality Farm Equipment; Osha Gray Davidson, Broken Heartland; How To Keep Farm Equipment in the Fight; John Deere General Purpose Tractor; John Deere General Purpose Tractor Models A, B, G, M, H; The New John Deere Model "H" General Purpose Tractor; "Number Of Farms Drops But Acreage Increases," Rockford Register Star, April 8, 9, 1965; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census 1975, Historical Statistics Of The United States, parts 1 and 2; USDA, Agricultural Statistics 1970, 1976, 1991, and 1998.]

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