The March/April 2024 issue of Antique Power magazine is available in our gift shop and will be available in subscriber mailboxes and on newsstands soon. The Keystone Truck & Tractor Museum displays one of the few Brockway tractors ever built, a 1949 Model 49G.

What’s a Brockway?

The Keystone Truck & Tractor Museum displays one of the few Brockway tractors ever built, a 1949 Model 49G.

text by Chad Elmore • photos by Brad Bowling

The Keystone Truck & Tractor Museum houses a wide variety of vintage cars, trucks, and tractors across its 125,000 square feet of floor space—or around 3 acres under roof. The green and yellow agricultural machines of John Deere are well represented, as are its major competitors—Allis-Chalmers, Ford, Oliver, and International Harvester. Rounding out the tour of farm tractor history is a smaller cluster of tractors with names that were not well known when new, and that only a few antique farm equipment aficionados remember today. The vanguard of that fleet is the museum’s 1949 Brockway Model 49G tractor.

“We’ve got about 190 tractors in here and 100 semis and heavy-duty trucks and at least 50 more pickups, cars, and fire trucks,” said Dylan Simmons, assistant curator of the museum, which is open to the public year-round in Colonial Heights, Virginia. “When you first walk into the museum, we have what we call the orphans and oddball section,” Simmons said. “There is the Brockway, a Leader, an Eagle, a couple of Graham-Bradley tractors, and a Sears Economy.”

Early Brockway Efforts
The Brockway stands as a memorial to the hard work of Lewis Brockway and his son, Walter. The pair were farmers and entrepreneurs in Auburn, a town in northeastern Ohio that was so small it did not have a post office.

They became tractor manufacturers in 1937 when they founded the American Garden Tractor Co. to build and market a 21-horsepower garden tractor of their own design. That venture quickly gave way to a larger tractor that used the powertrain from a 1928 Chevrolet. They set up a small assembly line in a barn in Auburn and were supported by a customer base comprised of local farmers. The small team built less than a dozen a year through 1939.

By 1940, the tractor’s design had evolved and the Brockways decided there definitely was a future in tractor manufacturing. They incorporated as the Leader Tractor Co. in 1940, with Walter as president and general manager, and set out to build four-wheel tractors that were a bit more refined, still powered by Chevrolet gasoline engines. Then World War II intervened, and Walter and Lewis taught machining and welding in their tractor factory.

When the war was over, the pent-up demand for new equipment caused by years of rationing made many an entrepreneur wealthy. New cars, trucks, and tractors were selling as quickly as they could be built.

To read the full story, pick up a copy of the March/April 2024 issue of Antique Power magazine!

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March/April 2024 Antique Power

What’s a Brockway?

The Keystone Truck & Tractor Museum displays one of the few Brockway tractors ever built, a 1949 Model 49G.

text by Chad Elmore • photos by Brad Bowling

Other articles in this issue include:

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