I am visiting my brother and he tells me this tractor on his lawn is a 1946 Ford. The one our father purchased many years ago was the 1947 model, also in classic grey. If it was not new when he bought it, it was only a couple of years old and a lot newer than any car he had at the time. Sidney liked mechanical things and I am sure he was very proud of his tractor, with its 3-point hitch and a power take-off.  The plow could be raised and lowered mechanically and I remember the whine of the wide belt that would run from the power take-off to a bench saw, making it so much easier to transform long lengths of trees into stove wood sticks. My father was able to adapt some of the equipment he had used with our horse Cappy and some he sold or bartered for things he needed for the tractor or for the car.

My mother noted in a letter to her brother that they could till so much more land with the tractor . . . then added that the more land they cultivated, the more work there was to be done.  It appears that the labour the tractor saved on one end was just added on to the other end.  But those were optimistic times and neither my father nor my mother were afraid of hard work.