Catalog companies spent decades rebadging products made by others and offering them to consumers as something made by Sears-Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, JCPenney, and many others. This JCPenney 16HP Garden Tractor (basically an MTD 990) is listed here on Facebook Marketplace in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and they’re asking $800. Here is the original listing, and thanks to Lothar… of the Hill People for the tiny tractor tip! If it were a bit more local, I’d be all over it. I’m a big fan of Montgomery Ward (Wards) lawn equipment, and this “Penneys” tractor would be fun to own.
Speaking of Penneys, how about that, the U.S. Mint stopped making pennies! It’s probably way overdue, but dang. Ok, back to this rebadged MTD 990 lawn tractor, or rebadged lawn tractors, in general. I have a weirdo 1960s Montgomery Ward Garden Mark, which is a rebadged Yard-Man, and I know a lot of you have “catalog brand” lawn tractors and other equipment. It’s one of the blessings (or curses?) of having grown up in the pre-Internet era. We had catalogs rather than a keyboard and monitor to look at things, “dream books” for those of us who were young, or young at heart. It’s weird to think about now, but I wouldn’t change a thing.
Modern Tool and Die Company (MTD) was founded in 1932 in Cleveland, Ohio. Or rather, two gentlemen bought the assets of MTD in 1932 and began making industrial rolling equipment and dies for window manufacturing and other products. Over the ensuing decades, they saw incredible growth and acquired many companies, and by 1958, they came out with a rotary lawn mower. 1959 saw their first self-propelled lawn tractor, mowers, and similar equipment. Their model 990 (Farm King) lawn tractor, which I believe this rebadged JCPenney Garden Tractor is, came out in 1971 and went away after 1984. This example looks like it’s in nice condition and would be an easy restoration project, or just use it as it looks now.
The engine is a 531-cc Briggs & Stratton single-cylinder with 16 horsepower. It has an electric start, of course, and the 990 has a hydrostatic transmission with both forward and reverse. The seller says the 50-inch mower deck is hydraulic-powered (up and down) and runs off of a driveshaft. It starts, runs, and works as it should and has new deck bearings, a new battery, new engine belts, a new steering box, a new starter, and a new carburetor! Wow, yeah, at $800, this looks like a winner. Are any of you into vintage lawn tractors? If so, what’cha got?
Wow!!! MTD sure has changed a lot over the decades. But still here I believe. I remember lawn and garden tracotrs like this at Sears with a much littler me making engine noises pretending to drive them. This is neat, and probably not too many out there, especially as nice as this one. A shaft drive is definitely a beefy setup ready to work. Although with how nice this is I dont think I’d want to ruin it. Scotty your Montgomery Ward machine looks prestine. I like it!!! Great write up Scotty and a great find too Lothar….. Of the Hill People.
Fun write-up Scotty. Interesting to learn some of the history. Your Montgomery Ward Garden Mark is cool.
I have a 1970s Craftsman mower with a 22hp Onan Vtwin It has a hydraulic powered front bucket that has power down and tilt ONE time when I was piling up dirt I tried to pile it higher it flipped over backward but luckily it stood on end and didn’t fall over on me
Growing up on a farm in the 60’s. I always like the way the big Case tractors along with Minneapolis Moline and Allis Chalmbers,John Deere and International too. With the prominent front end. Just looked more muscular. Vintage garden tractors from this era had the same confident lines. I guess its easier to see over the angled down aerodynamic tractors of the last 20 yrs.
Lambos may come and go, but a JC Penny tractor, now THAT hits home,,for many. Penny’s was kind of the “anti-Sears”, they also had almost everything, just a bit cheaper. It’s no surprise, my (Packard)grandfather shopped exclusively at Sears, my old man at Pennys. Penny’s was the absolute MASTER of the rebadge. I had a Pennys CB radio with Sony guts. I think all electronics were Hitachi with a Pennys name.
There were 4 steps in grass cutting. Push mower, push motorized, riding mower, and the garden tractor, each for whatever use was needed. The garden tractor was the top at the time. It did it all for a rural homeowner. My particular version, was a 70s Simplicity Landlord. with this motor but gear drive. To illustrate my frustration in todays life, in 1985, I bought the tractor for $25, WITH all attachments( tiller, snowblower, mower deck and grader blade) didn’t run. It needed a coil wire, and I used that tractor in all modes for 20 years, it never failed, in the coldest/hottest weather. Sigh,,,anyway, nice find, I always liked cutting grass, with a tractor, that is, get your mama to push a lawn mower,,
My dad
My dad ( born 1916 ) only bought Sears products,we lived in a farm town of 800 so we had to go into the city of 50 k to Sears.All appliances,tools,water tank, air cond, and of course a riding mower.He liked the fact they had a parts dept. In 92′ i gave my brother pops riding mower that was probably 15 years old at the time.
I have a 1974 Bolens Mower/tratcor. 16 hp Onan twin cylinder engine. Hydrastatic transmission. Drive shaft to engage deck small flip switch to raise and lower the deck Very similar to this one pictured except for engine. I got it in 2004 and am still using it.
I have the same tractor I bought it in 1979 used it for everything. Still runs still mows fun to play with.
My first riding mower was a Hechinger rebadge. Hechinger was a local company here in the Washington DC/ Baltimore and Northern Virginia area that specialized in everything for home improvement. It started as a Mom and Pop store with John Hechinger selling used building materials post WW2. Over the years it expanded to about twenty five stores if I remember correctly. I worked for them in the mid seventies for a few years. Since I got an employee discount on the Hechinger mower; it was a no brainer. I can’t remember who the actual manufacturer was but I had it for years. It had a Techumseh one lunger motor and it outlived Hechinger Company. Hechinger was put out of business by Lowe’s and Home Depot right before the turn of the century. Big national chains with more wholesale buying power. Too bad because Hechinger was a good place to work. The company executives and managers really cared about their employees. As the inevitable bankruptcy loomed, Hechinger people derisively referred to Home Depot as “Agent Orange”. My wife also worked for them and her position went redundant when she was on maternity leave. As they say, stuff happens. So here’s a RIP to Harry and Harriet Homeowner the official mascots for the company. It was a good run while it lasted. And I got another trip down memory lane courtesy of BF. Thanks.
@Carbob: We had a Hechinger not far from us in Randallstown,MD.
Much better than than the Depot! Still pull out paint stirrers,etc. with their name on it.
* I still remember a girl that worked there. Wowser.
Love seeing this stuff on Barnfinds. I’ve collected garden tractors for many years. I have an Allis Chalmers 416, a Case 444, John Deere 140 H3, Bolens 1050, plus the king of garden tractors, a Gravely 9000 (above) The Gravely has a Continental 4 cyl engine, manual transmission and a shuttle clutch for forward and reverse. It has hydraulic power steering, live hydraulics,
live front and rear pto with a 72 inch deck and a 48 inch wing mower for a total of a 10 foot cut.
I also have a Bolens Ridemaster with a whole trailer load of implements and a couple of Yazoo zero turns (made before zero turn was a thing) look these up on YouTube – several cool videos.
Lots of toys to play with. I usually don’t have a problem mowing my yard😁
Will try picture again, but once in awhile they don’t post. One of the mystery of life I guess. Loved the write-up!
Oh man, these are such great stories! I was hoping this one would spark some memories, and you folks saved the day on this one. Thanks for all of the information on lawn tractors and tractors, in general, and for letting us in on your memories; those are so fun to read.
More just for you Scotty.
Long ago there was Case 446 here. Case dealer had a thing for customers and a couple of engineers were there.
I asked why at that price they didn’t have bearings where they had bushings. Then we’d have to have grease fittings and no women would buy them.
What where the hydraulic pipe rubbed a hole in itself and shot oil
50′ through then snow?
We know about that and we’ll get that changed later this year,
Seemed to not be a lightweight. It didn’t exatly look to be the same kind of case as the DC4 or the 526 crawler loader.
Small stuff that’s still here might come later.
This brings back a lot of memories. Back when I was a kid, my job was to cut the grass around the farm buildings and the trees along the lane into the ranch. My weapon of NO-choice was a Sunbeam 18 inch Twin Blade Rotary. Yes! An electric! Complete with a plethora of cuss words, especially when you inadvertantly ran over that 150 foot umbilical cord and had to fix it.
Lucky I didn’t electrocute myself. I did get zapped a time or two. Maybe that’s whey I’ve got such an ‘Electric’ personality?
Anyways I used to read ads in Popular Mechanics, The Farm Quarterly, and the Montana Farmer Stockman, peddling those cute garden tractors.
The first one I saw was Wheel Horse. I thought it would be such a great idea, riding around the lawn, and then mounting the tiller and doing the 2-acre garden. I dropped subtle hints but got totally ignored. About then, John Deere came out with its line of lawn and garden equipment, with IH not far behind.
But the electric mower was the Sentence. Well, Dad got a Lawn Boy 20 inch for doing the trees along the lane, then trim along the fences coming back.
One day, Dad must’ve had some money burning a hole in his pocket because he came home with a brand new Cub Cadet 122 in the back of the pickup. I immediately put that to work but found out that I was now transferred to the field sprayer, the hay field, and the general farming chores.
My younger brother got to run the garden tractor. And yes, I was pi$$ed. But I took it with sort of a smile. I now ran the full-sized tractors, the Cat, all the farm trucks and even had time to ride the bike and check the cows. Well, I was 11 by that time so it was time to advance.
When I got into the repair business I saw a lot of tractors like this traded in. I could soon see the differences between something that was designed by a tractor company and something that was designed by a lawn mower company; the John Deere and International products were well built albeit heavy as well. For example you wouldn’t want to drive across the lawn just after a heavy rain; but then, you had no business trying to cut grass after a heavy rain anyways.
This looks like one of the better-built garden tractors. It’s good to see a substantial engine instead of one of those aluminum vertical-shaft jobs that started leaking oil after a couple of seasons. I might add that even JD started to compromise some its standards by cheaping out on its lighter units…
Sears Suburban 12 HP Tractor
Oh, the tales I could tell about my ’67 Sear Suburban 12hp tractor! Like trying for 30 years to break it (I never did!) Plowing snow with first a plow and transitioning later in the season to the snow caster when the banks got too big to bull back. I had a generator for standby power for our place up in the northwest hills of CT. I had a sicklebar with which I was able to get a few buck mowing. I hauled TONS of cordwood from our 8.5 acres and some woodland across the road which was miles deep. I rolled it with the sickle bar one time. Once ’bout a mile back in the woods back flipped it when it started to buck on a root with tire chains on (I landed on my back and shunted it off to the side!) I hauled dirt when hand digging our hillside house’s foundation in order to rough out the driveway. I pulled massive roots out with a little jiggering and a lot of imagination.
Our drive was 200 feet plus a “T” at the top of its 40 foot rise. A six inch snowfall would take me about 2.5 hours to dress out including cutting back the upstream banks at the town road so the “townies” couldn’t fill in all my work.
It was built by Roper and had a 3-speed + reverse gearbox/diff with hi/lo ranges. I probably put in excess of six thousand hours on that poor Techumseh single and it was still running strong (on only its second drive belt!) when I sold the whole shebang and we moved to FL.
Oh, and our acreage was all woods. “Big Blue” never mowed a single blade of grass. Most of uts usage was at full throttle. The compression release lobe on the cam wore down and I had to roll the engine back to the tail end of the prior compression stroke for the starter to gain enough oomph to kick it over. Starting sub-freezing required a 60W light bulb under the tarp overnight. It always started!
We certainly got our money’s worth out of it.
Great stories Will.
I wish one could still buy stuff this solid today. Stuff that was solid metal, and readily repairable. Even very expensive machines today are half plastic. We paid more for the solid North American made stuff 50 years ago, but they lasted a lifetime.
Early 70s I did production welding at Gilson Bros. Lawn mowers, tillers, snowblowers. Garden tractos and attachments had seasons.it wasn’t too boring the first year. The paint line was open except for the booth. Some days the color changed
More than once a day.
I don’t remember all the brands they were besides Gilson.
The plant and warehouse is still there but it’s been Toro for many years.
I have a 1981 John Deere 111 that my Dad bought for me in 2007 when I was 9 years old. I used it until 2013 and then I parked it. I’ve been saying for years that I’m going to restore it but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
81 Simplicity 1211 here. Bought from a neighbor for $400 when I bought a vacant lot.
New tires, belts & blades & off we go. Then replaced the seat & the carburetor. Runs like a top, 48″ cut.
I have my late father inlaw’s prized 1969 John Deere 112 with hydraulic lift. I completely disassembled and restored it in 2008. I’ve taken it to a few shows like the 50th. anniversary show put on by the Horicon JD plant where it was built.