Oliver Collectors Gather in Auburn
Published: Friday, March 20, 2026
Oliver hasn't built a tractor since 1976, yet inside Kruse Plaza, the brand feels strangely alive.
People who grew up with Oliver still talk about the machines as if the company never disappeared. They show tractors their families used for farming, parts their grandfathers made, and engines they rebuilt from scrap. This is because no factory now makes replacement parts.
At the Winter Tractor & Gas Engine Show last weekend at Kruse Plaza in Auburn, Oliver is represented by the people who bring the machines. They line them up and keep them working.
For Larry Widner, that connection runs deep.
"My uncle was the Oliver dealer on the north side of Fort Wayne, and that's what I grew up with, Oliver tractors," he said. "When we farmed, we farmed with Olivers. All my uncles farmed with Olivers. I didn't know there was anything else 'till I was out of high school."
He is the president of the Oliver Gang. This group includes enthusiasts from Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and parts of Canada.
Widner said his family once farmed the ground northwest of Fort Wayne that now hosts a Walmart strip mall, surrounded by commercial development and subdivisions—a landscape that bears no resemblance to the fields he worked in the 1960s and 1970s.
Widner brings tractors that stand out on the floor.
His high crop came from the deep South.
"That's the only one in here, and they're unique," he said. "They weren't around here. They were in the southern, you know, states: Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida."
His Super 44 came out of the Carolinas.
"Came out of the tobacco fields down in the Carolinas," he said.
He owns about 40 tractors, though he avoids counting.
"You never count them," he said. "You name them. They tell me that way, your wife can never really know which ones you're talking about. Then he laughed. "You always buy one you don't really need. So you can sell it and say, See, I sell them once in a while. "There is a method met-ods to our madness."
He's also the person people contact when they find something unusual.
"I get pictures all the time," he said. "Someone might text me a picture of a tractor behind a barn and ask, 'What is this?' I'll reply, 'That's a 77 or 550.' Then they'll ask, "Should I buy it?" I'll say, 'If you don't, I just might.'
Widner likes the part of the show where people learn something.
"You can't let it die," he said. "If you don't show people what these tractors were, they'll just think everything started with computers and plastic."
Bruce Bell sees the show from the operations side.
As president of the Farm Power Club, he's the one who knows how many people and machines it takes to fill Kruse Plaza.
"Oh, we'll get over 3,000 people," Bell said. "And there's probably 200 tractors. Yep, roughly. There are 60-plus in just Olivers. So then you got the Averys. You got everything else."
Bell doesn't own an Oliver.
"My best friends have Olivers," he said. "I do not own one."
His favorites are John Deere Ds. "The John Deere D is probably my favorite," he said. "I just thought they were cool and neat, and I own three of them."
The Model D is one of Deere's most famous early tractors. It is a two-cylinder model made from 1923 to 1953. It is known for its simple design and the slow, thumping sound of its exhaust, which became the signature noise of early Deere engines.
Bell points out the unusual machines on the floor.
"You're not going to see them everywhere," he said of the high crops. "That's all Southern Texas and California."
His job is to make sure the show runs.
But he's also the one who sees how all these machines—and all these memories—fit together under one roof.
If Widner brings the stories, Mark Korves brings the parts that keep many of the tractors running.
Korves runs Korves Oliver, a family business in Waterloo, Ill. It has been in the family for three generations. They specialize in making reproduction and machined parts for Oliver tractors that the factory no longer supports.
"That was what my great-uncle Oliver, a mechanic from back when tractors were new, said. And he kind of got my grandfather buying new tractors, and we just kind of farmed with them, and we started restoring them, and couldn't find parts. So that's when we started resourcing parts and finding parts, and it kind of escalated from there," he said.
What began as a necessity became a business.
"Now we have a business," he said. "My son is with us, as well as my father. So it's a three-generation business going on, and we still farm a little and do this as a full-time job."
They manufacture most of what they sell.
"We make all of our own parts," Korves said. "Either we have companies that do tooling, build new tooling, reproduce new parts, or find other sources for it, or we buy some stuff that's out there in the market and wholesale and retail it.
Sometimes they have original drawings.
Sometimes they don't.
"Sometimes, yes," he said. "Sometimes it's just the original part and re-engineering."
He sees his work throughout the building.
"You look around here; there are lots and lots of our parts on these tractors," Korves said. "I mean, you know, so it helps."
He knows which tractors are hardest to support.
"Probably like the little Super 44 because there were only 750, roughly, of them built," he said. "The lower the production models, the harder it is to find parts harder to justify reproducing the part."
And he knows the rivalry.
"There's only one good green," Korves said. "But there is one green better than Oliver green, believe it or not, and that's money green." Then the punchline: "There's always a joke between Oliver and John."
Not every tractor on the floor is Oliver-related.
Larry Palmer brought a BF Avery Model V, a small Louisville-built machine with its own unusual history.
"'46 was the first year for the Model V,' Palmer said.
The story, he added, is that the "V" stood for "victory" after World War II ended.
"They were made in Louisville," he said. "And they're kind of a partially lesser-known classic; not as many of them."
His tractor stands out for another reason.
"They never made one with a tricycle front end," Palmer said. "It could be the only one like it in the world."
The change wasn't original.
"A father and his stepson reworked it. They created this version" he said. "It looks like it was from a factory, but it's not."
Keeping it running takes work.
"I've just put $500 into the starter," he said. "Needed new field coils, tuned it up, got a new regulator, and changed the oil and filter, and it just adds up."
Across the floor, the machines tell different stories.
Family farms, lost fields, unusual finds, and the work required to keep old iron alive all converge in one place. The show isn't about one club or one collector. It's about the people who bring these tractors out of barns and sheds and put them in front of the public one more time.
For all the machines on the floor, the show is really about the people behind them.
These tractors kept farms moving because someone was willing to fix what broke, make what didn't exist, and finish the work, no matter what. That spirit is still here. The companies changed or disappeared, but the machines ran because the people who used them never stopped keeping them alive.
The tribute isn't just to old iron—it's to the grit that kept farms going.
And it's the antique machines that, decades later, are still pulling their weight, even if just for fun.
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