Minneapolis Moline show coming to Charles City

By Thomas Nelson, tnelson@charlescitypress.com

Train collectors will assemble in Charles City for the Minneapolis-Moline Collectors Winter Convention March 22 through 24.

“It’s always an honor to be chosen as a location for a winter convention or summer show because people from the United States come to it, and it’s good to get people here,” said Floyd County Museum Director Mary Ann Townsend.

The Floyd County Museum will be hosting several of the events during the convention.

Minneapolis-Molines are tractors that were originally created in Minneapolis. Eventually, White Farm, the tractor company that was located in Charles City, bought out the company.

“Although they made their own tractors starting up in Minnesota, eventually they were made here at our plant,” Townsend said. “They did not want to come down here. There were a lot of hard feelings when they shut down that plant in Minneapolis.”

The Charles City plant would create three tractors at a time and paint one green and sell it as an Oliver tractor. The next one would be painted red and sold as a Cockshutt, and the final one would be painted gold and sold as a Minneapolis-Moline.

The plant also created Moline plows.

The Minneapolis-Moline Collectors have a convention every winter.

“We’re the only place that has Minneapolis-Moline archives,” Townsend. “They don’t have a museum to call their own.”

We were very happy to have a footprint of the Minneapolis-Moline plant in the Floyd County Museum, Townsend said.

“We have some of their archives in the vault, that came out of our plant because when they (The White Farm Oliver Plant) closed, they made sure their history files got over here,” Townsend said. “There are things we have here they can’t get anywhere else, like their build records and photos.”

The Minnesota State Historical Society has all the negatives of photographs that came out of the Minneapolis-Moline plant, Townsend said. But, access to those negatives is difficult to get.

“You have to be specific and tell them exactly what picture you want to look at,” she said. “You can’t just go in and say, ‘I would like to look what negatives you have from Minneapolis-Moline.'”

Several nearby farms in Floyd and Bremer Counties will have tours during the convention.

“These farmers are going to take their tractors out of their sheds and make them all shiny and pretty,” Townsend said. “We have about five men coming up here that worked at different jobs at the White Farm plant and they’re going to be doing a discussion here.”

The discussion will be 1:30 p.m. Friday, March 22, in the Floyd County Museum.

“I expect a big draw for that,” Townsend said.