TRACTOR TRIVIA and other interesting stuff 4/20/2024

[953 nut 55,163]

Galloway Farmobile Tractor and much more

 

William Galloway became successful by providing what the customer wanted and making the purchase a pleasure. He learned customer service as a door to door salesman after graduation from collage and working as a traveling sales representative for farm implements.

With the lessons learned on the rural roads of Iowa, Galloway began a farm implement dealership in Waterloo Iowa in 1901 and looked for opportunities to meet the needs of his customers.

Within a couple of years, he was manufacturing his own line of harrows, carts wagons, and manure spreaders. Soon the product line expanded to include gasoline engines, cream separators, tractors, and other implement specialties.

When William Galloway decided to get into the engine business in 1906 he bought an established business, the first Galloway engines were built by a Wisconsin firm, but beginning in 1908 they were built in the Waterloo factory.

Galloway built its “Frostfree” line of water-cooled engines in sizes from 1-3/4 to 15 hp along with a 1-3/4 hp air-cooled model. All engines were available as stationary or portable (on wheeled trucks) versions. Prices in 1913 ranged from $29.75 for a 1-3/4 hp air-cooled to $439.50 for a 15 hp portable. (frostfree means the water-cooling tank could be drainer easily)

The William Galloway Company had outgrown its manufacturing facility after six years and moved to a new fourteen-acre floor space building in 1907. He was providing employment for over eight hundred people and had sales of two million dollars. Galloway’s sales catalog business provided serious competition to companies such as Sears & Roebuck at that time.

The majority of Galloway’s sales were mail order from his catalog with over three hundred thousand customers.  Since he had a strong catalog customer base Galloway added household items. The 1913 catalog featured 146-pages of engines, pumps, sawing outfits, manure spreaders, cream separators, portable elevators and well drilling outfits. There were litter carriers, incubators and brooders; sprayers, grain drills and corn planters; plows, harrows and cultivators; harness, saddles and buggies, as well as Galloway wagons, which were famous for their high quality. Also, anvils, forges, iceboxes, mattresses, roofing, work clothes, windmills, and almost anything the farmer could imagine. You could even buy the Little Wonder Vodaphone, tennis rackets, roller skates, and even bicycles through the Galloway catalogs.

Since most customers for farm implements traveled to Waterloo Iowa to pick-up their purchases Galloway built a rooming house known as the Galloway Club where customers could eat and sleep for free.

Galloway expanded his product line in 1908 to include manufacturing a vehicle promoted as a conveyance that could carry the family to church on Sunday and haul cargo during the week. Power for the rather basic high wheeled car was a two-cylinder, fourteen-horse power engine. One advertisement made a comparison between owning a Galloway Auto Transport to owning a horse , telling prospective customers it was a waste of money to feed horses “… corn worth 75 cents a day and oats worth 35 to 40 cents, and hay worth $14 to $20 a ton …” when they could buy “Galloway’s New Auto Transport,” which “Puts Town Next Door to Your Farm for less than $36 a Year.”

The 1910 acquisition of the Maytag-Mason Motor Car Company gave Galloway a much more acceptable car. The Maytag-Mason Automobile was powered by a two-cylinder engine designed by Fred and August Duesenberg.  This is the same Maytag that produced gas engines for agricultural machinery and washing machines and the same Duesenberg brothers that went on to produce some of America’s most presages automobiles.

 

Agricultural equipment sales remained strong and were so profitable that it allowed Galloway to make further ventures intro the motor vehicle manufacturing arena. The Dart Truck and Tractor Company was brought into the Galloway family in 1910. These were well engineered machines with chain drive which were update

The “Farmobile” tractor was Galloway’s entry into the farm tractor market. The 12-20 model powered by a Dart four-cylinder liquid cooled engine with a two-speed transmission was featured in their catalog for $ 995 and promotion claimed that the Galloway manufactured tractor “Pulls Anything, Anywhere, Anytime.”

Having a line of trucks and a tractor to pull the Galloway farm implements made them a full line manufacturer.

The October 17, 1918 edition of Automotive Industries noted that “the new worm drive tractors produced three years of experimentation.” The article also states that “…in January of this year the company received an order for 1,080 tractors of this type from the well–known British firm of Henry Garner, Ltd.”

The future looked very promising for Galloway with increasing sales of Farmobile Tractors and Dart trucks. A new smaller general purpose Bearcat tractor was being added to the line and the company needed to expand its manufacturing facility to accommodate the growth.

Galloway decided to sell corporate bonds to generate funding for the Dart Truck manufacturing facility.

Volume 99, Bankers Magazine, 1919, “One of the largest bond issues ever handled by Iowa banks has been underwritten and sold by the Waterloo Clearing House Association without the assistance of either Wall Street or LaSalle Street interests. This was the $1,750,000 issue of the William Galloway Company of Waterloo, Iowa, hearing date of July 1, 1919, and due July 1, 1925. Both are a direct obligation of the William Galloway Company and are a lien against its plant, properties, and business.”

The agricultural depression that followed World War Two and the recently generated debt load were insurmountable for Galloway and the firm went out of business in 1921.

William Galloway’s sons resurrected the company in late 1926, but on a much more modest scale. As a mail-order company for farm supplies. A 1939 catalog lists cream separators, manure spreaders, harrows, gas engines, feed grinders and hammer mills, wagons, barn equipment, poultry equipment, and paint. No further information was found past 1939.

[Ed Kennell 38,114]

2 hours ago, 953 nut said:

He was providing employment for over eight hundred people and had sales of two million dollars.

This is an amazing for that era.