BY JANE BLOODWORTH ROWE
CREEDS — John Deere green was the color of the day on Saturday, Nov. 5, when tractor enthusiasts gathered at Bonney Bright’s Farm on Buzzard Neck Road in Creeds for the annual Plow Day, organized by Bright and Chesapeake resident Ashton Lewis.
Still, while the bright green tractors were the most conspicuous, John Deere enthusiasts didn’t hold a monopoly during an event in which vintage tractors from near and far came to plow acres of Bright’s farm.
“I like to argue with these John Deere boys,” said Henry Curling, pointing out his own 1960 Allis-Chalmers tractor.
Curling, a retired farmer from Chesapeake, said that his father sold Allis-Chalmers tractors from 1950 to 1973, and he still owns two – the 1960 tractor that he took to Plow Day and a 1955 model.
Many participants were farmers or retired farmers, and others were just attracted to old tractors or other vintage farming equipment.
Some, like Brandy and Jerrard Hand of Petersburg, never farmed but were exposed to it growing up in a rural area of upstate New York. They were intrigued enough to buy their own tractor, which they hauled from New York to Petersburg when they moved to Virginia.
Others, like members of the Albemarle Antique Power Association, were just “folks who collect old power equipment,” said Elizabeth City resident Jim Watson, a member of the association.
Soderberg, who grew up near sawmills in Maine, was always fascinated with steam engines. He has created a hay press and steam-powered tractor, each one-third of the actual size, that he has shown in the Virginia State Fair.
The hay press facilitated the process of hay baling by compressing hay that was fed into it so that it could be more easily bundled and tied, but human labor was still required to feed it into the machine and tie the pressed hay.
A steam engine, which might have been used to plow or to perform other farm tasks, required several people to operate it, including one person to place wood on the fire, another to handle the water that created the steam and an engineer to monitor the process.
“Roads and bridges were made for horses and buggies and not for machinery in those days,” said Soderberg, who added that crossing bridges on those metal wheels could be a little dangerous.
Still, as labor-intensive – and potentially dangerous – as the early power equipment was, it was still much more efficient than mules and plows, Soderberg said.
Even after World War II, when farm equipment became mammoth and intensely powerful, working in the field was still tiring, dirty and potentially hazardous, according to Lewis, Wilson and North Carolina resident Bill Jennings.
“If we had to work on these tractors all week, we wouldn’t be out here playing now,” Jennings said. Those huge tractors left a trail of dust and fumes, and “farmers inhaled dust all of the time.”
Still, some become nostalgic for the old method of deep plowing and those old tractors. Lewis estimated that there were about 70 tractors, some from as far away as Iowa.
By mid-morning, they’d already plowed one field and Lewis was moving them to a second one.
“I grew up with these tractors,” Jennings said, “and I’m reliving my past.”
“I like them because they work for a living,” Lewis said of the classic equipment at work in a rural Virginia Beach field.
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