Wheel Tractor Production - Charles City Plant For 86 years, the Charles City plant produced Hart-Parr, Oliver, and White tractors. Production started with Hart-Parr No. 1 bearing serial number 1205 in the winter of 1901-1902. It ended with a White Field Boss 100 with serial number 401 505 built on March 28, 1988. The chart below shows the yearly production of wheel tractors built at the Charles City plant. As you review the numbers, you can see the impact of droughts, wars, commodity prices, politics, and ownership changes on the annual tractor production numbers.
A fairly common question among collectors is how many Oliver tractors were produced? Even with the annual total tractor production number below, this question can be complicated to answer. If you are asking specifically for Oliver tractors, we need to look at numbers from the start of Oliver Farm Equipment in April 1929 all the way to February 13, 1976 when the last Oliver branded tractor was built. To get close, we can take the totals from 1930 - 1975 which gives us 487,264 Oliver tractors. I say close because there was over half of 1929 that would technically be under the "Oliver" name along with the fact that the first White tractor was built in 1974. With that, a few Oliver tractors (models 99/Super 99, early 950-990s, and Super 44) were built at the South Bend plant and are presumably not included in these numbers. If you consider just the Hart-Parr years before the merger in April 1929, we can get a really close count looking at 1901 - 1929 with a total of 43,075 Hart-Parr tractors. Lastly, there is the production of White tractor models. Their production started in 1974 with the White 4-150, but the plant was still producing Oliver tractors at the same time in 1974 and 1975. To get close, we can use 1976 - 1988. Keep in mind, the Charles City plant didn't build a complete White tractor after March 28, 1988. Instead, they did castings and built sub-assemblies for White and some Deutz tractors into 1993. The chart below does list numbers for 1989 and 1990, but also notes the number of Deutz tractors built in the plant during that time. White tractor assembly moved to Coldwater, Ohio later in 1988 so I am not sure what these numbers represent. Regardless, to get close for the Charles City built White tractor numbers, 1976 - 1988 gives production numbers of 40,304. When you put together all the years of tractor production in Charles City under the 3 brands, the grand total is 570,663 tractors. That's right, over half a million tractors built in Charles City, Iowa! Former Oliver employee, the late LeRoy Kuhlers gets the credit for this great piece of history. Comments are closed.
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AuthorJim Fitzgerald Archives
May 2024
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