Boise’s Tractor Doctor
Rob Bearden revels in try-it-again pluck of tractor-makers
By Laura Read

Every Wednesday in Boise, Idaho, amid stately historical buildings — the domed Greek Revival courthouse, the Spanish-Colonial train depot — a tour of one of America’s great vintage tractor collections takes place. The man leading it is known as the Tractor Doctor. Google him, and the results fill two pages. Ask fellow staffers about him, and they break into grins. “He has a genius’s brain,” says one.
On every afternoon but tour day, the Tractor Doctor is cleaning, painting, repairing — maybe even cranking up — one of the 50 vintage tractors and steam engines he cares for onsite; but when the tour begins, he fires up stories. His name is Rob Bearden, and he gives voice to the try-it-again pluck of America’s early tractor builders.

The tractors are front and center in Boise’s new community center, a 7.5-acre park and gathering space called Jack’s Urban Meeting Place, nicknamed JUMP. Without the tractors, JUMP might not exist. Without Bearden, the tractors wouldn’t carry the panache they do. “In 1790, 90 percent of people were farming, and we fed the United States,” he likes to say. “In 1990, 2 percent of people were farming, and we fed the world. It’s because of tractors!”

The collection originated in 1998 when, after its previous owner passed away, Idaho’s J.R. “Jack” Simplot, founder of one of the world’s largest private agricultural companies, bought them at auction, saying he’d build a $100 million agriculture museum for them back home in Boise. In 2008 at the age of 99, Simplot died without making that happen. But his vision endured. His heirs formed a foundation and created JUMP, which opened in 2015.

Searching for a tractor guru, JUMP found in Bearden a charismatic blend of storyteller, tinkerer, and engine aficionado. He’s loved engines since he was a child roaming among the garlic, onion, and alfalfa fields of Yerington, Nev. After his family moved to Washington State, he devoured drafting, electronics, and welding in shop class. “I was a mechanic from day one,” he says.
Bearden relishes new facts and rare bits of history. He’s also fascinated by people. “I’ve pushed people for hours in wheelchairs,” he says. “Little kids — I’ve pushed them onto tractor seats; their eyes lit up. You talk about a community…” He leaves his thought unfinished, then adds, “This is a lot of fun.”

Some of Bearden’s stories refer to the same decade in which Jack Simplot raised his first potatoes. Simplot was 20 years old in 1929 when he launched J.R. Simplot Company in Idaho. The company developed a dehydrator and supplied millions of pounds of dehydrated potatoes and onions to the military during World War II. Later, it created the first commercially viable frozen French fries for McDonald’s.

Bearden admires that spirit of invention. “After 1885 when the internal combustion patent expired,” he says, “everybody started to build engines, some of which evolved into tractors. The race was on!”

His first tour stop is the 1909 Advance-Rumely “Kerosene Annie,” the groundbreaking Oil Pull factory prototype that abandoned the complicated, heavy, and expensive steam power systems of the time. “This prototype was built just to see if it would work,” Bearden says. Steam engine tractors required two operators, he says. Kerosene Annie, with an internal combustion engine that started on gas, ran on kerosene, and cooled with a lightweight oil, required only one.

The 1920 Frick Eclipse is one of his favorites at JUMP. “Sooo original!” Bearden exclaims. “The steering is extra heavy duty. It has a twin cylinder engine. The boiler is on its own frame. Nothing bolts to it!”
There was a time when do-it-yourself machines were the rage. A tribute to that, JUMP’s 1936 Theiman looks like a giant — and elegant — praying mantis. “It was a kit tractor,” Bearden says. “For $185 you could buy everything you needed to build it,” except for the automobile engine that powered it.

There’s also a 1926 Fordson Model F, a Harrison Jumbo, a 1935 Oliver Hart-Parr Row Crop, and a 1912 Olmstead Four Wheel Pull. There are two Deere & Company machines: a GP and a Model D — and two more Deeres in storage across town. Bearden’s booklet about all of them is available for free on JUMP’s website.

The community center complements Boise’s architectural landmarks with its unusual design by Adamson Associates, Inc. A helix-shaped structure integrates the garage and tractor displays with activity rooms made for everything from podcasting to exercise to cooking. Details emphasize “play,” even on the garage’s top floor, where a tube slide spirals five stories down to the ground below.

“The element of surprise and delight — it shifts your brain because you walk into a world that’s so different from your day-to-day,” says Maggie Soderberg, JUMP’s founder and director. Among the lawns is a 30-foot-high jungle gym. “Kids get up there and yell, ‘I’m not afraid of heights anymore!’” she says. “The five-story slide is a little scary when you start down it; but when you get down, you can say, ‘Wow, I did that!’”

Bearden has as much fun as the kids. His office, cocooned in JUMP’s central core, brims like the workspace of a wizard with tools, toys, and talismans — plus a mini-museum of small engines. File drawers hold copies of period tractor manuals. It doesn’t take Bearden long to find one for a Deere & Company Model E engine. Instructions say, “Read Carefully, Save!”

J.R. Simplot would be content.