Hey, you didn’t think that I’d be done with showing you around the massive Paquette International Farmall Museum and hall of fame in one collection of photos, did you? Of course you didn’t. This group of photos still finds us in the first building of tractors on the sprawling Paquette property and that makes sense because there is so much to see. This building is almost exclusively farm tractors but there are some interesting pieces snuck in here and there as well. One of them is the neat old IH skid steer that my kids were obsessed with below and another was the beautiful orchard tractor shown above.
While the orchard tractors must have been a pain in the backside to work on with their additional bodywork, they look awesome for the same reason. My wife thought it was some sort of racing tractor and my kids loved the cowling over the area where the driver sits. If you are not familiar with an orchard tractor, they have that body work so branches and sticks don’t get caught up in the engine compartment, tires, or the driver’s hands and upper body. We’re not sure if many were sold in the Florida area (for use in groves maybe?) but we do know that there were lots of them in New England on apple growing operations, etc.
There’s lots to see and admire here. Paquette has everything from International Harvester refrigerators to some of the actual uniforms worn by the ancient factory baseball team. It is an extraordinary gathering of neat stuff.
I dont know on the Internationals but on the John Deere orchards you still had to start them at the fly wheel with those big fenders on there. The only place you could get ahold of the flywheel was at the bottom and hoped you got a big turn out of it. Did you see any high crops? The ones used in sugar cane fields?