The November/December 2019 issue of Antique Power magazine will be available in subscriber mailboxes and on newsstands soon. Our latest cover tractor is a 1919 Kinnard-Haines Flour City 40-70, which serves as this year’s Antique Power Century Tractor. It was photographed by Brad Bowling, and Robert Gabrick researched and wrote the article.

Like millions of North Americans, perhaps you had a bowl of cereal for breakfast—maybe Wheaties “The Breakfast of Champions” or Cheerios, both made by General Mills. Your dinner later may have included a large piece of freshly baked Pillsbury Devil’s Food Cake. Each of these iconic foods has its origins in Minneapolis, Minnesota, also known as the “Flour City,” and for half a century, as the flour milling capital of the world.

Another icon from the Mill City deserves to be remembered—the Flour City line of tractors manufactured by a firm established by Owen Brooke Kinnard and Albert Haines.

Tractor World addressed the issue of the tractor versus the horse in its September 1919 issue, which was the year our “century” Flour City 40-70, owned by Kenny Kass of Dunkerton, Iowa, was manufactured by Kinnard & Sons Mfg. Co. “The man who has used animals knows that they … have limitations,” said the article. “He knows that they are used but a part of the time. The cost of animal service is at least twice what it was prior to the European war, and the productiveness of the horse in useful work has not increased.”

While never having worked with horses, Kenny Kass has developed a passion for “big gas prairie tractors” from the era of the transition from steam to gasoline and a time when horsepower increasingly replaced horse power.

As a boy, he learned to appreciate a guiding principle of rarity over quantity for collecting. That began in 1963 when he was 12 years old and became interested in “hit and miss” single-cylinder gasoline engines. He went to a farm sale where his father bought a John Deere & Co. engine. At that time his uncle gave Kenny an engine, and he got the bug, eventually acquiring about 75. This effort to acquire quantity eventually led to a realization that rarity should be the rationale of collecting. Despite the rush that comes with the quest to acquire the next collectible, rarity became the key principle that has guided his collecting efforts.

Kass acquired a 1917 Advance-Rumley Co. OilPull Model 15-30 in 1981 and a 1915 OilPull Model 30-60 in 1983. In 1984, he purchased the featured 1919 Flour City 40-70 from Harold Ottaway, one of the pioneer collectors. For 15 years, the Flour City slumbered. Confronting the likelihood that he would never get the time to do the restoration himself, Kass turned to Clyde Hall, a professional tractor restorer in Fillmore, Saskatchewan, who had previously done restorations for him. Hall completed the marvelous 10-month restoration of the Flour City in 1999.

Kass said he collects tractors because “they are just so neat and so cool,” he said. “The engineers some 100 years ago came up with ideas without the aid of computers. These men had little education, yet they developed things like disc brakes, positive traction, and fuel injection.” Kass promotes the important role these pioneers played in developing significant innovations. “They had all kinds of ideas and the belief they could build a better tractor,” he said. He wants to give them the credit they too often do not get. “When folks tour the collection housed in four climate-controlled buildings, they marvel at the massive tractors, saying, ‘I can’t believe what I see.’”

To read more about the 1919 Kinnard-Haines Flour City Model 40-70, pick up a copy of the November/December 2019 issue of Antique Power magazine!

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November/December 2019 Antique Power

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