Dale Hall of Mt. Washington, Ky., was set up at the Penfield (Ill.) Historic Days with an unusual tractor: A 1946 Chevrolet Prototype. “This tractor was designed in 1946,” Dale said, “by a GM engineer named Willie Nutter Jr. He built this for Chevrolet to compete with the Ford N Series.”

The tractor is outfitted with a 216 engine, has a four-speed transmission and was built in Paris, Ky. “Willie Nutter Jr. was an outside contractor and he made this contraption over the years,” Dale explained. “In 1946, Chevrolet sent him a complete running 1.5-ton truck and said to use this and make a tractor out of it.

“The front half of the tractor is the pickup truck. The objective was to use as many parts as they could that they already had.”

After the tractor was produced, General Motors never manufactured it and Dale thinks that is mostly because of the time, with the end of World War II. Chevrolet was busy producing cars and trucks around the clock.

“It would have taken a dedicated assembly line and this tractor was an unknown quantity,” Dale added.

This story is really like a Paul Harvey “the rest of the story” type of tale with two other side stories – one about Nutter and the second about the finding of the tractor. “The Nutters had a 500-acre farm,” Dale said. “The farm was close to Lexington, where they raised high-dollar horses.”

Nutter was born deaf and mute, but was a genius with mechanics. The family homeschooled him and hired teachers to come to the house. “On the farm where he did his work, there was a big wooden barn and they built a concrete building inside with machine tools,” Dale said. “I believe the footers for the concrete building are still there.”

The rare tractor was highlighted in Farm Collector in the “Rusty Iron” column in March 2004 and revisited that May. The article identifies a man named Steele White, who had once worked on the Nutter farm as a teen, and he mentioned Nutter had also built a grain binder and stationary hay-baler.

White is also cited in an antique tractor forum where he is pictured with the tractor and Dale, and he states Nutter wanted the name on the tractor to say “Nutter Chevrolet,” and that GM did not.

The article said Willie Nutter Sr. died about 1960, and his son followed just a few years later. At the time of his death, Willie Jr. was building plows in his shop for Brinly-Hardy, a garden tractor company in Louisville. 

After the Chevy tractor was built the Nutter family used it for some things, but Dale said because it was geared like a truck they never used it for farm work. Over time the tractor was set aside.

It would be more than 40 years since the tractor was built before Dale would see it.

“In 1991 I went to look at a truck. I went out to the barn and this was in there,” he said. The man whose farm he went to adjoined the Nutter farm. The prototype tractor had sat on the fence line for years. The man obtained the tractor and had it in the barn for safekeeping.

While he didn’t buy the truck, Dale did take the tractor home after the owner told him its history. He realized this was like no other tractor he had seen.

Once the tractor was home he had a lot of work to do. Since he had worked as a millwright at a GE plant in Louisville, he had the skills needed to attack the massive project: “It didn’t have any paint, the tires were flat and the engine block was frozen. The steering wheel was nothing but wires.

“I found the tractor in 1991. I put it in the shop a few weeks later and took the engine head off. I got it to run, then quit and disassembled everything. I came back to it in the summer of 2003 after my wife, Marilyn, said that I had better work on it because no one else could put it back together,” Dale recalled.

He searched for a 1946 truck and an aluminum block. It was on the truck he found the paint code, so he knew what color to use.

He had found a little blue paint when he took it the prototype apart, but had previously been unsure what color it was. Once the tractor was back together Dale and Marilyn sanded and painted it. “By the end of winter of 2004, we had it done,” he said.

The Chevy tractor gets around, as Dale takes it to shows about 2-3 times a year so people can learn the history of the tractor that almost was. But the prototype is just one of the tractors he owns. “I am an International Harvester guy, so I have Farmalls, about 20 more at home.”

Keep a watch for this unusual tractor – it is the only one like it, so it is worth a once-over.

Readers with questions or comments for Cindy Ladage may write to her in care of this publication.