Bill Hedrick has a few farm tractors tucked away. To be exact, the retired mechanic from Battleground, Ind., has 84 tractors, many of them restored. Several are unique, but perhaps none is more unusual than the Farmall H pictured here.

Hedrick has restored many tractors over the years, and not all of them are red. None of them has the wheel configuration this Farmall H features. “It was already set up this way when I bought it years ago,” he explains.

Hedrick says the Farmall H came from a sod farm. It was used to roll sod, and the extra-wide steel wheels on both the front and rear were what the doctor ordered for rolling sod. This setup provided plenty of contact with the ground.

As far as he knows, the people who operated the sod farm were the ones who gave the tractor this wheel configuration. Since it is so unusual, Hedrick has kept it this way, even though he doesn’t really need a tractor with super-wide steel wheels.

Hedrick’s son Jason, who works full time off the farm, has caught the tractor-collecting and restoration bug as well. Some of the tractors in the family collection are his.

According to tractordata.com, International built the Farmall H beginning in 1939 to replace the F-20. It was then replaced by the Super-H in 1953. The H was offered in several configurations and designations, including the H row crop tractor, the HV high-crop version, the W-4 standard tread, the I-4 industrial and the O-4 orchard version. More than 391,000 Farmall H tractors were built, but as far as anyone knows, none of them left the factory looking like this one!