Where have all the Fordsons gone?

Once the king of the hill in American agriculture, the blue Fordson tractors have all but vanished from the rural landscape. 

The Fordson tractor factory in Dearborn, Mich., which was owned by automobile manufacturing barron Henry Ford and his son, Edsel Ford, was humming along between 1918-27, but the American agricultural market began to experience declining farm prices early in 1928, an omen of the upcoming Great Depression. 

In anticipation of hard times ahead, Henry Ford suspended U.S. production of Fordson farm tractors in 1928. He reckoned the world’s diminished demand for new tractors could be handled by Ford’s state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in Cork, Ireland, which had opened in 1919.

It’s an interesting story for the Ford family. Henry’s father, William Ford, was born in Ballinascarthy, an Irish village about 30 miles down the road from Cork. William Ford emigrated to the United States in 1846 to escape the effects of the Great Famine. He was 21 and settled on a farm near Dearborn, outside of Detroit. 

In 1861, William Ford married Mary Litogot, a daughter of Belgian immigrants. They had six children; Henry was the eldest. 

Irish academician Dr. Leanne Blaney explained that Henry Ford decided to invest in Ireland while World War I was still raging. Ireland seemed safer than England. He found a suitable factory site within “a city park and racecourse on the banks of the River Lee.” Construction began in 1917.

 Henry Ford

In 2017, on 100-year anniversary of the Ford groundbreaking in Cork, Michael McAleer of The Irish Times in Dublin wrote: “Forget about Michigan and the Motor City. ‘Ford is a Cork company; it just has a very large American branch to it.’” 

“The trundle of an assembly line in Cork showed that Henry Ford never forgot his family’s roots,” McAleer said. 

From 1928-39, all Fordson tractors and its new variants were manufactured at Cork and other Ford plants on English soil in Manchester and the Dagenham district of London. Ford’s U.S. business suffered greatly. Ford lost its dominance of the American tractor market,” with its share bottoming out at 5% in 1939. 

Henry Ford was forced to reverse gears. To recapture U.S. farmers as customers, he knew he had to produce American tractors in America. A deal was struck between Ford and Irishman Harry Ferguson, who was manufacturing superior tractors in the United Kingdom.

Essentially, Ford would produce tractors in Dearborn, using Ferguson’s patents. It was a bumpy arrangement with Ferguson to begin with, but things became even more complicated with the onset of World War II in Europe in 1939. 

In 1945, the company gavel passed to Henry Ford II, eldest son of Edsel and Eleanor Clay Ford, and grandson of Henry Ford. 

Henry Ford II, who was 28 years old, promptly severed ties with Ferguson, who was 61 at the time of his dismissal. 

Ford branded tractors began replacing Fordsons in the fields in 1953, and, it was decreed in 1964 that all tractors made by the Ford companies worldwide would carry the Ford oval blue brand and distinctive script. 

In 1986, Ford expanded its tractor business with the purchase of Sperry-New Holland. Four years later, Ford’s farm equipment lines were acquired by Fiat of Turin, Italy. Fiat removed all Ford identification from their tractors. 

Fordson and Ford tractor enthusiasts responded by forming the Ford/Fordson Collectors Association with the purpose of “saving the past for the future.”