Minneapolis-Moline Company

Minneapolis-Moline Power Implement Company was created in 1929 by a merger of Minneapolis Steel and Machinery Company, Minneapolis Threshing Company, and Moline Implement Company. Together they formed what was called a “whole line” farm equipment company, one whose products served the planting, harvesting, and processing of grain crops. At the time of the merger it was the fifth-biggest farm equipment company in the country and one of the biggest employers in Minneapolis.

Minneapolis-Moline dates back to the Candee & Swan Plow Company of Moline, Illinois, founded in 1865. It became Moline Plow Company (later, Moline Implement Company), a major Midwestern producer of tilling equipment: plows, harrows, and other tools for sowing grain crops.

The Minneapolis Threshing Company began in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in 1874, and settled in Hopkins, Minnesota, in 1887. It concentrated on equipment for the last stage of small grain production: threshing.

Minneapolis Steel and Machinery Company, founded in 1902, began by making heavy construction equipment and steam engines, then moved into vehicles, including tractors (the Twin City line, 1912) and buses. Its chief executive, Warren C. MacFarlane, engineered the 1929 merger of the three companies and became president.

The merger produced a company that served farming tasks year-round: tilling, planting, weeding, harvesting, and processing. Such integration was needed to compete with industrial giants like John Deere and International Harvester. All three of the constituent companies made, or had made, tractors. After the merger the company trimmed tractors to a single line, Twin City, made in Minneapolis. Harvesters and, later, combines, were built in Hopkins, also the company’s headquarters; tilling equipment was made in Moline.

In its first full year of operation, 1930, Minneapolis-Moline earned a profit of slightly more than one million dollars on sales of about $13,500,000. Then two catastrophes struck. The Depression devastated farm country; farmers stopped buying equipment. Then, in September 1932, Warren MacFarlane was seriously injured in a car crash. He spent five months hospitalized, partially paralyzed. By 1933, sales had fallen to $2,336,000, producing losses of over $1,500,000 and a reduction of employees from over 3,000 to just 672. Losses grew to over $2,000,000 in 1934.

The optimistic MacFarlane predicted a rebound in 1935, achieved through improved farm conditions, aggressive price-cutting, and innovation. Minneapolis-Moline’s new line of combines, called Harvestor and built in Hopkins, captured 20 percent of a reviving market and helped produce a profit of $170,000. Sales grew steadily over the next five years, from $9,000,000 in 1935 to over $16,000,000 in 1940. During World War II the company made artillery shells, naval winches, and construction machines for the Army and Navy, in addition to its regular agricultural line; sales and profits grew.

The post-war years were even better. The company’s best-ever profit year was 1950, when it made over $7,000,000. Minneapolis-Moline did business in all forty-eight states and across Canada, in Argentina and Mexico; it had over 2,000 dealers. Sales once reached $100 million. At home its employees, whose numbers may have reached 6,500, competed in company baseball, volleyball, bowling, and sharpshooting leagues. But trouble lay ahead.

In 1951, looking to strengthen its position in the American southeast, Minneapolis-Moline acquired the B. F. Avery Company of Kentucky. The hoped-for benefits did not come. Meanwhile, the number of farms in the United States continued to fall, while M-M’s competitors—chiefly International Harvester, Allis-Chalmers, John Deere, and J.I. Case—got stronger. M-M fell from fifth place among implement makers to eighth. Losses began in 1954, the same year it opened a factory in Turkey. Over the next five years losses exceeded $6,500,000.

In 1955 a hostile takeover ousted most of the Minnesota directors; MacFarlane retired in January of 1957. His successor, J. Russell Duncan, returned the firm to profitability through cost-cutting and diversification, but he was ousted in 1960. That year the company changed its name to Motec, short for Moline Technology. In 1963 Motec was taken over by White Motor Company of Cleveland, with another new president and a return to the Minneapolis-Moline name. In 1972 White closed both the Hopkins and Minneapolis factories, putting over 1500 Minnesotans out of work. No physical trace of these enormous installations survives. By 1981, White Motors was out of business.