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Jesse G. Lindeman was born on October 12, 1899 in Cass County, Iowa he was the oldest of 6 children (Jesse: 1899 -1992) (Harry: 1900 -1930) (Ross: 1902 - 1947) (Leona: 1905 - 1983) (Joseph: 1912 - 1982) and (Alice: 1915 - 2000).
Jesse was raised on a farm in Cass County, lowa. He had an 8th grade education and on the farm he was always spared the farm work so he could "futz" (as he put it) with the machinery parts, which led to his life long love and career in the field of orchard machinery.
In May of 1918 at the age of 18, he joined the United States Army Air Corps. He was assigned to Post Field, Oklahoma. His duty was a forward flight observer spotting artillery guns from an airplane. Jesse was color blind to certain colors and could see through the camouflage netting.
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Post Field, Okla. 1918
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Jesse G. Lindeman
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His stay in the armed forces was short. The war ended, and he was released from duty in July of 1919. After returning home Jesse could not in vision himself as a "farmer", so he ventured out west to Ellensburg, Washington were his Uncle, Gus Lindeman, had an auto dealership. Jesse moved to Yakima and was hired as a salesman at Rovig Lumber Company in January of 1920. He contacted his brother Harry and convinced him to come out West. In April of 1921 Harry made the move and he too went to work for Rovig Lumber Company. |
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Jesse standing front of the car
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In those days the lumber company was like a general store, selling everything from nuts and bolts to equipment. Rovig handled trucks, farm implements, lumber, and the Moline Plow Line, which included the Moline Universal Tractor. There was a place for their tractor in the orchards of the Yakima Valley, but the tractor was too high to get close enough to the trees. Jesse saw a definite need and designed and developed the Extension Disc for the tractor. Unfortunately even though the disc sales were doing well, Rovig Lumber went out of business in 1922. |
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Extension Disc
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Jesse and Harry then decided to combined their life savings totaling $158.00 and purchased the parts and equipment valued at approximately $4,000 at the Rovig auction. They started their own small manufacturing and retail farm machinery business. They were in need of a crawler tractor for orchards, so Jesse traveled to Spokane and secured the agency of Caterpillars from the branch managed by Ben C. Holt. They named their company the Holt Tractor Agency. They sold a few of the two ton T-35's and T-29's and one of the ten ton loggers. Their chief income, however, was derived from making and selling a Disc Harrow, which was attached behind the Cletrac and Fordson tractors. They began to experience great hope for the future, so they adopted the rather long and somewhat impressive name of
LINDEMAN POWER EQUIPMENT COMPANY. There were, of course, several times within the next few years that they wished they had their original capital back of approximately $300.00. However, they had no recourse but to hang on. They developed other equipment that was either too expensive to bring back from the east or that was not suited for the specific needs of the Pacific Northwest.
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Two Row Ditcher
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In 1925 the Best-Holt merger took place and with Best in the saddle, the Holt agency was lost. Lew Acoff, an old Holt man in Spokane, told them that Cletrac had just released a new tractor, the Model K. He suggested they try for the dealership. Jesse left for San Francisco by passenger ship, the H.F. Alexander, out of Seattle, to meet with the Western Sales Manager of Cletrac. He came home with the franchise. This tractor was a perfectly designed tractor for orchard work and from the beginning had very few service problems. They became one of the larger dealers in the area. A third brother, Ross, joined Jesse and Harry's venture. They needed more room, as their company was rapidly growing; so they rented the former Cadillac dealership building located on South First Street in Yakima. |
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Lindeman Building on South First St.
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They added to their inventory a Dish Furrower, a Tractor Brush Rack, a Trailer for hauling fruit out of the orchard, the Friend Sprayer line, and the Mack Truck. Business was so good, that in 1927 they opened another branch in Wenatchee. Harry moved there to manage its operation. In 1928 they purchased about one and a half acres of property (which grew to about 10 acres), and built a section of what later became a 150' x 150' building. |
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Brush Rake w/Jesse driving
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Orchard Trailer
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At about the same time, Mr. Rollin H. White, who owned and ran Cletrac, began “tinkering” with the design of the tractor. It wasn't long before they found their “service trouble” mounting. Also, about the same time, rubber tires appeared to hold some promise for wheel tractors and competition from the Caterpillar 10 and 15 caused them to look into the handling of a wheel tractor. They moved the business in 1929 to the new location where they remained until the sale to Deere & Co. in 1946. In April, Harry was coming back from a meeting in Canada and his new car slid off a steep embankment near Chelan, Washington. He died in the crash. |
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South Third St. location
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About 1930 Lindeman Power Equipment Company became dealers for John Deere. They had branch plants in Wenatchee and Ellensburg. The John Deere tractor ran very well on “distillate, kerosene, good grade furnace oil, light grade of fuel oil”, at a cost of about 6 cents per gallon which looked awfully good to the average farmer during the depression period. Jesse had thought a lot about putting tracks on a John Deere, so in 1932 he put a pair of Best tracks and rollers on a John Deere Model D. They had built 3 or 4, when word got back to John Deere. Colonel Wiman was a man of vision and apparently requested that one be sent back to Moline for a demonstration. On a cold raw day (Jesse said that he was just about frozen, as he was not accustom to that type of weather) the Colonel brought the skeptical engineers down from Waterloo for the demonstration. |
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Model D Crawler leveling land
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Jesse would run the crawler up on a stump and spin it around. The Colonel was very impressed. He gave Jesse and certainly his people much encouragement in this effort to give Deere a crawler tractor, if it deemed practical. After the demonstration, the Colonel told Jesse that this D Model was going to be discontinued because they were converting from a 2 speed to a 3 speed. The Colonel took Jesse to his office downtown, and there they warmed themselves by putting their feet up on the steam heater. Jesse was in seventh heaven. He was just a farm boy with an 8th grade education and was in the company of the head of the Deere and Company, who liked his idea. With that, Jesse went about designing tracks for the GPO. They built about 2 dozen before Deere stopped producing them. |
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GPO Crawler driven by Joe
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H. G. "Pat" Murphy, (a cousin of Colonel Wiman, was the branch manager of the Portland, Oregon branch) and Ben Keator could see a need for a tractor with tracks in order to stay in competition with Caterpillar. They told Jesse that they could get a new chassis orchard Model BO and would Jesse design it to take tracks? Jesse jumped at the chance and about a year later he had the first Model BO Crawler Tractor. It was field tested at the Congdon Orchards in Yakima, where, unfortunately, the orchard was mostly flat ground. They started the first production of crawler.
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Early Flat Back
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The first ten units produced had metal-to-metal plates that operated in oil. Two crawlers were sold to a McMinnville, Oregon customer who had all hillside fields. Trouble started immediately. With all the constant use for the hillside brake, the metal plates started to flake metal particles and fill between the plates and would not let it disengage. Jesse was up against a brick wall. He had paid off Deere and the other creditors so he couldn't buy the tractors back. He had to make them work. He also heard that 6 other crawlers were having the same problems. He solved the problem with Chevrolet dry clutch plates riveted on about half the existing steel plates. In order to get by until the conversion package was ready, he had them take the housing apart and clean it and put it back together the way it was and then fill it up completely with oil. This gave him enough time for the younger brother Joe (who had joined them in 1934) to take the conversion out and install it. Fortunately, the crawlers were within a short distance from Yakima, so Joe could replace a kit on one or two (mostly in over night trips) and bring the old parts back to the plant and deliver another one to another location. This procedure solved the problems and it in turn made the Lindeman a better tractor.
While Deere production of tractors was practically shut down during World War ll, they were able to get priority from the War Production Board for these tractors which allowed Deere to run several hundred of the chassis. By this time they had become manufacturers as well as retail tractor dealers with Disc Harrow, Furrowers, Brush flake, Trailers, Sprayers, etc.
In 1946 Deer advised Jesse that they were going to discontinue the Model B Tractor. They suggested they would welcome the company to pursue the possibility of converting their new Model M to tracks. |
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Two Way Roll Over Plow
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At about the same time they had developed a rollover plow to fit the Harry Ferguson System, along with a Transplanter. They had made about 300 plows for Mr. Ferguson when he gave them a contract for 10,000. They would produce 50 per day, 250 per week and load them on railroad cars or trucks and get their money from the bank, a profit of $18.60 each. |
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Loading Plows
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They also had a contract with the Thys Portable Hop Picking Machine Company to build their picker in this area. The Thys Company did not have any drawings but the did ship 2 machines to Yakima. So as rumor goes, Jesse had one of the machines placed on the show room floor and cut it down the middle and reproduced it that way. He also took one completely apart and reproduced every part, then put it back together using the original as a pattern. |
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Two Thys Hop Picker
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Upon completing the Model M conversion, Deere and Company had made an offer to purchase Lindeman Power Equipment Company. This put Jesse up against that brick wall again because the Federal Trade commission was about to step in due to the Deere-Ferguson rivalry. Jesse knew he could still made the deal with Deere and not include the plow or the hop picker. Jesse and Joe purchased 10 acres of property on South First Street and started Northwest Equipment Company in order to finish the already placed orders for the plows and hop pickers. Colonel Wiman along with Pat Murphy came out to view the conversion of the M tractor and finalized the purchase of the Lindeman Power Equipment Company to Deere and Company. |
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Pat Murphy (MC) & Col. Wiman (BO)Racing
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Deere and Company took control of the plant on January 1, 1947. On December 28th prior to the take over, the steel foundry caught on fire and burned to the ground (a $50,000 loss that was covered by insurance). The rest of the plant was not damaged. |
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News Clipping about the fire
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The plant was sold for $1,147,340.18 with Jesse receiving the bigger portion along with stocks in Deere and Company. Part of the deal was that Jesse move to Moline and head up a development department. Jesse went back to Moline for a short time. Neither he or his wife, Jane, liked it back there. He went to the Colonel and told him they were going to have to back out of the whole merger. The Colonel said, “hold on now. . . you go back to Yakima and head up the engineering and just come back to Moline two or three times a year.” So that is what Jesse did until Deere closed the plant in Yakima. |
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Jesse on the first MC off the line
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Northwest Equipment Company had completed most of the plows when Harry Furgeson came out with a tractor with more horse power that could pull a two bottom plow. Jesse didn't want to retool for the bigger tractor, so Furgeson canceled the remainder of the plow orders and gave them a nice severance pay.
Jesse and Joe took over the operation of the Northwest Equipment Company when John Deere closed the Yakima plant.
Jesse not only was a brilliant engineer, but also a journeyman pattern maker. He was constantly thinking of easier and more efficient ways to operate machinery. If he had an idea in the middle of the night, he would get up, down to the plant, draw it up, make a pattern for casting it, and the next day it was cast and on the production line. |
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To be continued
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When the weather turns bad enough that I can’t be out side playing with my Lindeman.
Here it is spring 2008 and I didn't get anything done on the site except to update serial numbers so the history of Northwest Equip. Co. and Lindex Co. will have to wait until this winter.
Sorry
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