Event returns with spotlight on Longmont’s Gibson Tractor
A Longmont tractor manufacturer that sowed the seeds that helped the city’s job market grow in the mid1940s and early 1950s is going to be the star of the upcoming Yesteryear Farm Show.
Roughly 20 Gibson Tractors will be among the more than 200 antique tractors featured in the threeday show. The Yesteryear Farm Show runs 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday outside of the Dougherty Museum,
8306 N. 107th St., south of Longmont. The show is free and open to the public
to attend.
As the wind whipped across the open field near the museum on Friday, farm show volunteers Dave Brown, Jon Judson and Dick von Bernuth measured out where they would place behemoth pieces of farm equipment.
Brown said he was glad to have the show return, following a temporary hiatus last year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“The purpose is to demonstrate how food used to get to the table years and years ago,” Brown said. “Young families go to the grocery store today and pick up a loaf of bread and
can of beans, or whatever, and they don’t have any clue how it got there.”
The show features working displays of antique tractors, cars and trucks. There will also be demonstrations of farm equipment, including threshing and baling, blacksmithing and spinning and weaving. A fundraiser auction for the show will be at 4 p.m. Saturday and will include a number of antique items, including a restored 1937 Allis-chalmers WC tractor.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Gibson Manufacturing Corporation. The tractors were made in Longmont and in Seattle, Wash.
Longmont resident Bob Mccarty is known by his fellow farm show volunteers as the “Gibson Guru.” Mccarty said while he doesn’t consider himself a Gibson tractor expert, he has become well acquainted with the years it operated in Longmont from 1946 to 1952.
He gleaned much of the information from the late Jim Stengel, a local expert on the company, who helped out with the farm show in the past and kept binders of information on Gibson’s legacy. Mccarty borrowed the binders from Stengel’s family, poring over the contents, while also compiling articles in newspapers and magazines that he came across himself.
What Mccarty took away from the history lesson was that, other than the sugar factory, which processed sugar beets, the tractor company was one of the first manufacturing industries in the city, leaving behind an impact still traceable today.
“(The company) kind of set the tone for Longmont to start transitioning from a bedroom community to a place where they have industry and jobs here,” Mccarty said.
Harry Gibson ran the Seattle plant, while his son, Wilber Gibson , went to Colorado to run the Longmont operation. Erik Mason, Longmont Museum curator of research, said the company’s first building was in a plant on Ninth Avenue, which was expanded to the building at 220 Collyer, where the OUR Center is today.
“Gibson Tractor was the first major postwar industry to open in Longmont,” Mason wrote in an email. “Although it wasn’t longlived, their building at 120 Ninth Ave. has continued to house primary employers ever since.” Circle Graphics, a digital printing company, is located at 120 Ninth Ave. today.
The Longmont Museum has a Gibson Model A tractor as part of a permanent exhibit, called “Front Range Rising.”
The company’s peak came in its early years in Longmont from 1947 to 1948, when close to 200 people were employed there, both Mason and Mccarty said.
The earlier models of the tractor came without a steering wheel and instead had to be maneuvered with a lever. Regardless of the design, which Mccarty said was the opposite of cutting edge, there was a demand after World War II for tractors.
Mccarty said the business was sold in 1952 to Helene Curtis Industries of Chicago. He said the company’s decline can be attributed to several things, including poor management, poor design and poor engineering.
A Brush News-tribune article about a 2009 tractor show that included Gibsons said that Helene Curtis Industries organized the company as a division of Fox Metal Company of Denver, with the intent to re-establish tractor production in Denver. But, the plant ended up making the parts and not the tractors themselves, the article said.
Following the sale, Mccarty said, Wilber Gibson had a temporary operation in Berthoud manufacturing tractors, but that came to an end after he died in the late 1950s.
Mccarty encouraged people to come out to the farm show and see the history for themselves.
“I think a lot of people have maybe a grandfather or a neighbor who worked there,” Mccarty said. “They are interesting little tractors, the designs of them. They’re fun to work on and fun to drive. It was an exciting part of Longmont.”