Acme's Minneapolis-Moline Dealership
The Acme Garage Story
The Acme, Alberta that Bert Jackson grew up in has key differences from the community that he still lives in today. “People back then weren’t as brittle as they are now,” he reflects. He also says that neighbours were more social, enjoying community dances and sporting events such as baseball, tennis, curling and skating. There were two churches, and there was no need for children to leave their community to go to school. Two grocery stores served the village.
The train had arrived in 1910. It was the Canadian Pacific Railway line that attached to Langdon, about sixty-four kilometres away. That spur stopped at “Acme”, the highest point. There were six grain elevators, all of which are now gone, and the railway itself disappeared in the 1980s. Bert repeats the phrase that I have heard again and again as I have researched the farm equipment dealerships and the little Alberta towns they served: “The roads killed Acme.”
In the mid-twentieth century, there was no reason for an Acme farmer to leave their community to purchase equipment or have it repaired. The Acme Garage sold International Harvester and McCormick machinery, as well as Ford vehicles. The OK Garage sold Cockshutt and Dodge. P + O sold Oliver. There was a Case, John Deere and Massey-Harris dealer. And a revolving door of owners, including Abram Klassen, sold Minneapolis Moline equipment.1
Abram was originally from Winkler, Manitoba. He arrived in the Linden area in 1903, travelling with a group of Manitoba neighbours to reach their new home in the Northwest Territories. Their welcome to Alberta was a ferocious snowstorm. A sodden summer stretched ahead, resulting in hosts of mosquitos. There was good eating, however, with plenty of prairie chickens, ducks and a good crop of delicious potatoes.2
At the time, settlers in the area were establishing their lives in their new community however they could. That sometimes included living in sod houses until they could afford something better. The sod houses were cost effective, cool in summer, warm in winter and all but impervious to prairie fire. The considerable downsides included that snow and rain were the enemy, causing the ceilings to leak mud for days. Mice and other vermin were inevitable roommates.
While Abram didn’t have to live in a “soddy”, his first summer in Linden was a learning experience. He had been completely unprepared for the hoards of gophers that demolished his first crop of grain. The hay crop was more successful, and Abram augmented his income by hauling coal, travelling by oxcart in a 110-kilometre round trip from Carbon to Didsbury.3
Abram had arrived in Alberta before it was a province. He was there in 1905 when it achieved its provincial status. Calgary Power did not arrive in the Acme district until 1928.4 Abram farmed in the Linden area for many years. It was when he moved to Acme to “retire” in 1944 that he decided to open a farm equipment business. Abram’s son Ben was serving in the Canadian army overseas. When Ben returned to Canada in 1946, he went into partnership with Abram at the Acme Garage.5
Bert Jackson recalls that the Minneapolis Moline equipment sold by the Klassens had harvesting equipment that was popular with local farmers. M-M was an American company with its headquarters located, predictably, in Minneapolis, and its products had already made inroads into central Alberta. An example is a 1917-era Minneapolis Threshing Machine Company cross mount engine 22-44 horsepower gasoline traction engine that had been used for plowing and to run a threshing machine in the Carbon area in the 1920s. The 22-44 came with two forward gears and one reverse, and it could pull four to six plows through the tough prairie sod, a job that was exhausting for horses. Its powerful engine could also run a heavy threshing machine. A Minneapolis Threshing Machine Company cross mount engine 22-44 horsepower gasoline traction engine is currently part of the Pioneer Acres of Alberta collection and a walkaround of it running can be seen in this @rainhill1829 video on YouTube.
(Used with permission of Justin Campbell).
The harvest season was and still is a labour-intensive job, but farming communities looked forward every year to the arrivals of the threshing machines and crews from the east. An entire team was needed to bring in the harvest. Hundreds of custom crews arrived in western Canada and fanned out across the prairies. The groups could vary in size from a compact group of ten people to a large squad of up to thirty. Skilled engineers and firemen were needed to run the specialized threshing equipment. Separator tenders fed bundles of grain into the threshing machine itself. Neighbours frequently teamed up, bringing along their horses, which were needed to haul water if the threshing machine was steam-powered. Others worked as field pitchers, who loaded grain bundles onto the racks pulled by the teams of horses or mules. Grain wagon drivers stood by to haul the newly threshed grain away.
While the engineers were the highest paid members of the team, the second highest pay traditionally went to the cook. Harvesting was a high energy trade, and the ravenous workers had to be able to count on high calorie meals. No one wanted to work for a crew where the meals were grimly economising, or where the food was badly prepared.
Despite the backbreaking work, harvest was a social occasion, welcoming visitors to remote prairie communities. Eileen (Lindsay) Brydges lived in the Acme area during the 1920s. She remembered the threshing season this way:
Threshing time was exciting. The grain having been cut and stooked, my father would erect temporary granaries in the fields; then the separator, engine, men and wagons would arrive. Some outfits had their own bunkhouses and cook car, and fed their own crew; sometimes my mother had to prepare meals. After a day or two of work at our farm the crew would move on, and my father would begin his days of grain hauling to the elevator.
Hugh Lindsay, Acme Memories, p. 246.
In 1929, the Minneapolis Threshing Machine Company merged with the Moline Plow Company and Minneapolis Steel & Machinery Company. It created an agricultural giant. The tillers and combines “Minne” built were popular in Alberta and some farmers felt that Minne had superior steel compared to competitors such as Massey Harris.6
By the time the Klassens took over their garage in the 1940s, agriculture was going through a significant change. The threshing crews had been greatly taxed by the competition with the Canadian army during the years of the Second World War, and the labour shortage had altered both harvest and farming itself. Ben Klassen was not the only young Albertan serving in the Canadian Army overseas. Going forward, combines, which could be operated by a single person, were the technology of choice. While pull-types were a popular interim device, the future was trending towards self-propelled equipment that used less steel. Minneapolis Moline had a reputation for building tough, heavy combines that could handle the conditions in southern Alberta and not be debilitated by contact with a rock. Depending on the model, combines could hold up to 45 bushels, a laughable figure by the standards today. To give you an idea, while model capacities vary, the contemporary Case IH Axial-Flow 8240 combine can hold up to 410 bushels!
Combines could thresh and winnow effortlessly. While they involved far less manual labour than threshing, they also changed harvest from a social event into a solitary pastime. The labour that had demanded between and ten and thirty people was now handled by one person and whoever was driving the grain truck. Combines represented a profound technological achievement.
The other challenge facing farmers and farm equipment businesses during the 1940s was extensive rationing. Agriculture was also competing with the military for rationed items such as steel, rubber and hydraulics. When a tire went missing enroute between Calgary and Acme, the Klassens took out a notice in The Calgary Albertan asking for its return. A reward was even offered for the valuable tire!7
Minneapolis-Moline was purchased by the White Motor Corporation in 1963. The last of the M-M badges on tractors was issued in 1974. White Motor Corporation was ultimately purchased by the agricultural giant AGCO.
Ben Klassen had left the Acme Garage in 1953, relocating to other opportunities in Calgary. Abram Klassen closed his business in 1963. He had witnessed years of extreme transformation in agriculture and in Alberta during the years he farmed and worked in the Linden and Acme districts. It would be interesting to hear his thoughts about Acme, Alberta today where there are currently no farm equipment dealers at all. Trochu has the nearest John Deere dealership and there is a Case at Olds, both around forty-five minutes away.
Interview, Bert Jackson, April 2025
Abram W. Klassen, Acme Memories, p. 332.
Ibid
Ibid
Bernhard “Ben” Klassen, Acme Memories, p. 332.
Interview, Bert Jackson, April 2025
The Calgary Albertan, 6 October 1943, Page 12
Thank you to Shelly McElroy for preparing this story.
Thanks also to the Historical Society of Alberta for their funding support.
Great post. Love the history and stories.