Donnie Sanderson is as full of conviction and fervor as a gospel preacher when he talks about his restored tractor and plow collection.

    His arms, hands and face get animated and his smile gets bigger, especially when he talks about his crawlers and how important they are to him. Kind of like a proud papa talking about a chosen child, he lights up and is ready for a visit with anyone about his 11 farm tractors and plows.

    When he gets on one of his crawlers, starts the engine, it starts to move; it’s like a time machine, it takes him back years to his youth. Back to when he drove a crawler and pulled a plow through the Wyoming soil for his father and grandfather.

    Crawlers are farm vehicles that move on tracks instead of wheels. They generally pull stuff like plows. Sanderson has some wheeled oldies, but the crawlers are what really excites him.

    Sanderson has collected tractors for 25 years. He’s found some crawlers in barns, some along the side of the road. Now and then he will find a valued piece of farm history ready to be sold for scrap, sitting in a barn or just off in field.

    He calls them, “muscle tractors,” that’s what farmers used to plow their fields with because of the power crawlers have to go up and down hills. They were the workhorses in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.

    Sanderson’s workhorses have as little as 35 horsepower to as many 335.

    Although he has cut back since moving to the Whitney area, he still grows some hay and grain. In the cold of the winter, he holds up in his heated shop to work on and restore the old crawlers and tractors.

    “I used these when I was younger. These are part of history,” he said referring to the Red Allis Chambers he was working on in his shop. “People will pay good money for these in other parts if the country,” he said.

    They all run, he won’t buy them if they don’t turn over. He told his son that when he dies to only sell his tractors to someone who appreciates them as much he does. The retired cattleman sold his Star Valley ranch and moved to Franklin County seven years ago and continued his yearning for collecting tractors.

    “The winters are a lot better here than the Star Valley ones,” he said. Sanderson has a collection of family heirlooms, a New Case bought by his grandfather in the ’50s and an International his father bought new in the ’70s.

    The last few years Sanderson has hosted a field day where he invites other old tractor enthusiasts. They had about 15 people pulling plows through the dirt near Sanderson’s home.

    Jim Summers and a neighbor in the Whitney area went to the field day. He said it was fun to see all of the old tractors working in the field.

    “My grandfather had a crawler near Blue Creek in Box Elder County, Utah,” Summers said. “One of the advantages of using a crawler is that it doesn’t compact the soil as much as wheeled tractors.”

    Summers, the FFA adviser at West Side High School, said he enjoyed watching the tractors in the field that day and he shot a bunch of pictures.

    Sanderson said he served lunch. Tractor owners from Wellsville, Utah, to Grace, Idaho, brought their tractors to his farm to play in the dirt.

    “It was a lot of fun,” Sanderson said.