Tractors Facts

Thousands of farmers drove tractors into Washington DC in February 1979 to protest farm policy. Police barricaded the tractors on the National Mall, and locals called them a nuisance. A Presidents Day blizzard then buried the city under two feet of snow. The stranded tractors were among the only vehicles still moving. Farmers plowed streets and drove doctors and nurses to hospitals. The city that scorned them started thanking them.

In a single day in 1952, the people of Moses Lake, Washington, built a whole farm for a stranger. From one minute past midnight, more than 50 tradesmen raised a seven-room house by floodlight while about 100 men on 25 tractors leveled and planted 63.5 acres. By day's end it belonged to Donald Dunn, a WWII tank driver whose Kansas farm a flood had wiped out.