Twenty years of Oliver restorations

RANTOUL, Ill. — Franklin Gaisler has featured his Oliver tractors during the past several Half Century of Progress shows and was at his 20th Historic Farm Days this summer.

“It’s important because some of these kids don’t even know what these tractors are,” Gaisler said.

“One guy at a plow day said he’d never plowed. Some guy said, ‘Get on my tractor and plow. He comes back, he says, ‘I’ll never do that again.’ Why not? He said, ‘I thought I was going to fall off. I never drove a tractor without a cab.’”

Oliver tractors have spanned generations for the Gaisler family.

“My grandfather had Olivers, my father had Olivers, I had Olivers, and we had Olivers until they stopped making them,” he said.

“I started collecting probably 20 years ago. I do all the work myself. I tear them apart and paint them. I just like bringing old junk back to new again, and you meet so many nice people.”

Gaisler’s first Oliver restoration project was the tractor his father used, an Oliver 88, on the family’s farm in New Jersey.

Ten years ago, he found his grandfather’s Oliver 77 in New Jersey and brought to his Illinois farm for restoration.

Gaisler recalled the phone call he received from his cousin in New Jersey about finding his grandfather’s tractor.

She went to a sale where she found that the tractor that had been sitting in the woods on the farm for at least 15 years. Gaisler’s uncle owned the tractor.

“The muffler was covered. I brought her home, put gas and a battery in it, and it started,” he said.

Illinois Move

Gaisler is originally from New Jersey, where his family operated a 300-cow dairy farm, and moved to Illinois in 1986 to farm near Mt. Pulaski.

“I quit the dairy business when the government had that buyout in 1986. They bought the cows. I sold the farm at the same time and I didn’t know where I was going,” he said.

“We looked in Pennsylvania at a lot of farms and they were just rocks and hills like I had in New Jersey. A friend of mine came out here to a meeting in Decatur. He said, ‘You’ve got to go around Decatur if you want good farm ground.’

“So, I called a realtor in Champaign, we came out, and a week later bought a farm at a good time for $1,500 an acre.”