Mr. Cato's Tractor

Mr. Cato’s Tractor

My Grandson, Levi, and I have been working on resurrecting an old Model C Allis-Chalmers tractor that once belonged to a dear neighbor. Mr. Cato and his wife, Elsie, moved into the Careywood, Idaho area back in the 1920‘s from Missouri, if I recall the story correctly. They bought some property up County Road 22 and proceeded to build a large barn and a house there, and then farmed there until they retired in the mid-1960‘s when they sold the farm and moved to Granite, Idaho. The Catos were stalwart members of the church where we attended during those years, and as a teenager I often stopped by their little house in Granite to visit with them and listen to their stories of the olden days.

My family lived in their old house for about a year when I was around 4 years old back in 1962. Mr. Cato (as we youngsters were admonished to address our elders) did much of his farming with draft horses, but he also supplemented the horse power with a little Model C Allis that was painted yellow rather than the traditional Persian Orange typical of the marque. I distinctly remember watching him doing farm work and listening to the characteristic ‘chuckle’ of its little four-cylinder engine; Mr. Cato was known to be a ‘thrifty’ fellow and didn’t believe in spending money on frivolous items such as mufflers, so the straight pipe exhaust made a notable bark whenever the governor would open up under load. I thought that little tractor was just about the most wonderful thing I had ever seen, and oh, how I wished I could get a chance to ride on it!

The tractor stayed on the farm when the Catos sold out and the farm changed hands a couple of times. I do remember a man named Jim Heckman living there with his family; my siblings and I were friends with their children, and we helped put up loose hay in the big barn that Mr. Cato built.

One summer, my Dad broke his leg in the woods, and Jim plowed a small field for us using the Model C and planted alfalfa in it. That same summer, Jim used the tractor to pull my Dad’s old Case hay baler; it was a hand-tie wire baler that required someone to poke the wires through on one side and someone else to sit on the other side to twist the wires tight.

Since my Dad couldn’t walk or drive with a cast on his leg, he sat on the baler poking wires through the hay while my sister, Rita, and I sat on the other side on a wooden bench; I tied one wire and Rita tied the other. One of the fields we baled was on the old Gene Elmer place up on Long Mountain, the ground was fairly steep there and I remember that little Allis struggling to pull that baler on the uphill side. It was quite the bumpy, dusty, noisy ride with the baler’s Wisconsin engine bellowing its staccato blast and the Allis-Chalmers engine barking its little heart out.

The Cato place changed hands again, and somewhere along the line the little tractor got neglected and was left with water in the radiator rather than antifreeze with the result that the engine block froze and cracked. Someone tore the engine apart and left it that way. I do not recall the when or why, but the Model C tractor and some old farm implements ended up at our place here at Careywood. One of those items was a horse-drawn David Bradley manure spreader, which I later restored and still use each year.

Sometime around the mid 1980‘s I bought an Allis-Chalmers Model 60 combine from our neighbor, Dave Vig; this combine used the same type of engine as the Model C tractor, and I purchased it with the idea of using the engine to re-power the tractor. The years went by and the cares of life interfered with such plans, meanwhile the jackpine trees grew up surrounding Mr. Cato’s tractor and threatened to swallow it completely.

Last winter we didn’t have much snow, so Levi and I went out and pulled the engine out of the combine and brought it into the shop. Lo and behold, the engine was stuck from sitting so long, but we dosed it liberally with various concoctions and soon had it rotating freely. A valve job was deemed to be in order, so Levi ground the valves on an ancient Van Norman valve grinding machine that I had refurbished; this valve grinder came out of the old Careywood Garage which had been operated by the late Chas Wallace from the 1930‘s through the 1960‘s; when my Wife’s family purchased the property in 1972 this machine was sitting on the bench with a broken drive cable. I always wanted to fix it up but never got around to it until last year when I fabricated a new drive cable for it (parts being just a bit difficult to source for 100 year-old machinery). It is not a very fast machine, but it still does a nice job on the valves.

As you may well imagine, there was plenty of rust, grease, and dirt to deal with in order to put the tractor back together again, and there is a long way to go still, but we were able to get it fired up late this summer, and Levi got to take the tractor for its maiden test voyage around the barnyard, and I got to take the second run. It only took 63 years, but I finally got to fulfill my childhood dream of taking a ride on Mr. Cato’s tractor.

In memory of Charles “Otto” Cato
Joseph W. Smith

I agree , good story
Thanks for sharing!