Oliver Tractor Photos

The Oliver company can be traced back to Charles Hart and Charles Parr, who started the Hart Parr company in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1897 to manufacture small gasoline engines. With financial backing from Charles Ellis, Hart Parr moved to Charles City, Iowa, in 1901, and built a new factory. By this time, they were mounting their gasoline engines on frames with wheels. They called their contraptions gasoline traction engines. The Hart Parr marketing department found that this was too hard to describe, so they coined the term "tractor".

Hart Parr went through a number of reorganizations, mergers, and buy-outs over the years. Notable are the 1929 purchase by James Oliver to become the Oliver Farm Equipment Company, Oliver's purchase of Cletrac (makers of farm crawlers), 1960 purchase by White Farm Equipment, merger with Cockshutt and Minneapolis Moline, and the White bankruptcy which lead to a series of inept owners including Allied and New Idea. Oliver is now part of AGCO. The last tractor bearing the Oliver logo rolled off of the production line in 1976.

Oliver did not make the biggest, most powerful, or the most tractors. They did, however, have cutting edge engineering that pioneered many of the features of modern tractors. They also were the best looking of any tractor line ever produced. As a result, classic Oliver tractors are highly collectible, and Oliver collector shows are held across the nation. Farmers are very loyal to their equipment suppliers. I grew up in an Oliver family, so am very particular about the colors of the tractors that I like. They have to be Olive Green and Fleetline Yellow for the older tractors, and Meadow Green and Clover White for the newer tractors.

Collected below are photos of various Oliver tractors and their cousins taken at farm power and collector shows. Also included is a series of photos of a large Oliver farm toy collection. Many of these photos were taken by my older brother, Loren Weeks, and are used with permission.