Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

It has been a great year here at Farm Jeep.  First came Teddy, the new Lawson Hill Farm  puppy.  Teddy arrived in March and quickly took up his role as official Jeep dog.

In May, the Spring Willys Reunion was held in Farm Jeep's hometown, Columbus, Indiana.  We gave a presentation on the history of the hydraulic lifts that made the Jeep a fully functioning utility tractor.  May is our favorite time of year in Indiana, filled with bright, sunny, warm days.  But not this year.  Storms battered the show, but it was a still a great time.

Summer time and the living is busy.  We took the Farm Jeep to a number of antique tractor shows across south central Indiana.  These are great events for collecting stories about how Jeeps were used on farms.  We plan to post some of those stories here.  We also returned to the county fair where the Jeep has become a crowd favorite in the antique equipment tent.

The fall edition of The Dispatcher Classic Willy/Jeep Magazine contains an article, the first of a series on the making of the farm jeep.  More articles will be published in the coming year.  We have enjoyed working with the editor and the Jeep community in gathering information for our take on history.

The year ended with the surprise of a Bantam plow finding us, as described in our last post.  What a very fun year.  We definitely look forward to all the discoveries of the next Farm Jeep year.

A Bantam Plow Saved From the Scrap Pile!

This is a story we couldn't make up.  We received a note from Les from near Waterloo, Ontario who had found our posts about Bantam plows.  He said his father had an old plow with a Bantam tag that hadn't been used for 10 years and was about to go to the scrap pile.  Les ask if we might know of anyone who would be interested in it.

We jumped on the opportunity.  Four days later, Barry was in Ontario to pick up this beauty.

The plow appears to be complete.  The coulters are frozen, but the landside gauge wheel hardware is there and is free.  It does have on old wire car wheel instead of a Jeep rim. but it adds character.  Not sure how much, if any restoration, we will attempt.

The trip

Evan had to miss this JPRT (Jeep parts retrieval trip).  Barry's first pre-trip task was to determine what sort of paperwork he would need to bring the plow back to the states.  Some net searching indicated that all that was required for used farm equipment was a bill of sale. It would be a 9 hour trip each way, so he decided to break it into two days.

The trip north was uneventful and the weather quite pleasant for the first of December.  The best part was meeting Les and his father Leroy.  The only downside was Barry was in a rush to get back to the US and couldn't spend more time talking with them.  Leroy loaded the plow using his backhoe and even strapped it down, while Barry stood by just admiring the beautiful sight.  Leroy supplied a bill of sale and it was all that was needed for getting the plow back home.

Ripley, Believe It or Not

Barry resisted giving Les a hug for sending the note.  These were big guys and he wasn't sure that was a Canadian thing.   But he did push Leroy for some history.  Leroy said, "Well, it's from Ripley, believe it or not!"  The plow had been attached to a tractor he had purchased in Ripley, Ontario some 10 years ago.  The seller said if he wanted the tractor, he had to take the plow too.  So the plow was set aside while the tractor underwent a restoration.  The tractor is gone, but the plow remained. 

What we learned 

Les had sent us the model number NDGP-12, which is the same number used by Newgren.  So it is now clear that they did simply change the tag from Newgren to American Bantam, keeping the Newgren model number.  Les also sent the serial number 5005.  While we don't know what starting number Bantam might have used, it is easy to speculate that they started with 5000 and this was the fifth plow released.

We didn't learn how it arrived in Ripely, but it does give us hope that more Bantam labeled plows will surface.  We just hope that there are more people like Les out there who will save them from the scrap pile.