The Stuttgart tractor was a revolutionary four-wheel-drive tractor made in Stuttgart, Ark. At the Minneapolis-Moline Winter Convention in 1999, the late Don Oliver – then the show host and an Oliver dealer, who since died in 2002 – shared the story of the Stuttgart tractor.

 

In 1961, Don owned the largest MM dealership in the county. Gary Oliver explained how his dad got into being a dealer: “Dad’s father- in-law was in the Case business and farmed. They bought the Weiman Minneapolis-Moline dealership. Now Prairie Implement has been here in business for 62 years.”

 

Don, his shop manager, Gale Stroh, and Kenneth Bull, the shop foreman, set about building what would become the first – or one of the first – agricultural articulated 4WD tractors developed.

“We put two rear ends together, and set a power unit above it and drove it with a chain link belt. We started with Minneapolis Moline Us, but they didn’t work well, they were too narrow, so we used GBs and liked them because they were wider that the Us,” Don explained.

The three men together built the tractor and they sold and delivered their first product in 1958. The very first tractor built, Don used for his operation in the rice fields of his Stuttgart farm. Gary has memories of working in the fields with that tractor. “I imagine I put about 80 percent of the hours on that tractor,” he noted.

According to an interview with Don published in Belt Pulley magazine in 1999, “We started building them, and farmers took to them. We never built one until the prior one was sold. We built 32 of them.”

Gary said the Stuttgart was built because of “a need for a bigger tractor and equipment.” At the time he said the tractor was built they were using 13.5-foot disks, but with the new hitch on the Stuttgart tractor, they were able to pull a 27-foot disk.

 

Built from parts already available and in stock, this was part of the secret to the tractor’s success. They redesigned the tractor in 1969; that made it easier for the vehicle to glide over the rice levies. The tractor started attracting attention and MM came out to look at it and wanted to take it back to the factory.

Don said he needed it to farm, but the company promised to have it back by March 1, so he allowed them to take the tractor back to the factory, where based on the three men’s design MM created its version of the A4T-1400 tractor. (“A4T” stood for Articulating 4WD Tractor, according to Gary).

“Dad was anxious about the tractor; he needed it in the fields,” Gary said, adding that when the tractor came back that they were surprised that it had John Deere, Case and IH dealership stickers on it. “We think people put them on at truck stops.”

The Stuttgart tractor was the forerunner of articulated tractors, though the company didn’t officially acknowledge it. “Allen Wells, the engineer (at MM), said this was the first tractor they didn’t have to make a prototype for – they copied from the Stuttgart tractor,” Gary said. “Allen Wells designed the frame for the White Company.”

Changes were made, they added a cab and went from propane to diesel and Oliver went on to build a different version after the A4T-1400 wasn’t being built any longer.

Besides Oliver, other companies picked up on the design; however, it all began in Stuttgart with the genius of three men through trial and error. It was first referred to as “the Stuttgart tractor” in a 1970 article that appeared in Automotive Engineering.

 

“I don’t think (Don, Gale and Kenneth) realized what they had done, or what they had accomplished. We had something nobody else had. They were just trying to sell farm equipment. Right about that time, I think Case came out with one (a 4WD), but it wasn’t articulating,” Gary recalled.

Don used the tractor and restored it in 1992. It was the centerpiece of his MM museum, which is a private museum owned by the Oliver family still today. Gary said there are some of the tractors Don built out there that are still around. The Stuttgart tractor continues to fascinate today, just like it did back when it was first built.