« Peerless Steam Traction Engine 1910 »

Once steam had been proven efficient in railroad use, manufacturing followed quickly in the form of steam traction engines for farming, road building, and heavy hauling in places where rail lines had not been built. The savings in human manual labor and time were great, not to mention the decreased need for animals for such work.

This real photo postcard (sent in 1910 by Joe S. with a barely literate message from Cuba, WI, to a lady friend, Miss Montag in Evanston, IL, at the burdensome rate of one cent postage) shows that a sizable steam tractor could do much the same work as a rail locomotive with some limitations and somewhat less efficiency due to greater friction than cars with iron wheels on rails and roads not engineered to minimize grades. This is a Peerless traction engine which was fueled with wood; it has a spark arrestor on the stack to make it less likely that the countryside would be set ablaze (you can buy steam powered models of many of these engines today, but they are pricey).

We don’t have the privilege of knowing what these wagons were being used for but the construction of the wheels and the load-bearing beams on the carriages indicate the load was enormous. A bit of research revealed similar tractors and wagons loaded with logs 3 - 4 feet in diameter.

It was interesting to discover that the photographer had deliberately eradicated the faces of the two men on the tractor and one of the men sitting on the top; at this period in time I don’t think it was done for privacy reasons, so I can’t say why. Is it possible that operators of such equipment on roads were required to be licensed and that identification of these men was not desirable?