Every fall, communities big and small hold tractor parades to celebrate all things agriculture, fall harvest festivals, and the joy of mowing. You’ll find these happy snapshots of Americana from farmland in Maine to the California mountains and everywhere in between, in places like Herndon, Virginia, and rural Pennsylvania.
One of the most visually spectacular events is the Mackinac Bridge Antique Tractor Crossing in northern Michigan. This year, nearly 14-hundred tractors trekked across the stunning suspension bridge — one of the longest spans in the world, their drivers coming from all across the U.S. for the opportunity.
“It’s just for the fun of it, I guess,” said parade founder Bob Baumgras. “A lot of people like the Mackinac Bridge and they like their antique tractors, so they kinda go hand-in-hand.”
“We’ve had people from as far away as Alaska who come,” Bob said. “One guy from California encouraged his three brothers to come. They hooked up his tractor to a trailer and drove here.”
“We got tractors from Idaho, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Florida, New York, just about everywhere.”
To get in this parade, your tractor must be at least 40 years old. And, of course, it needs to be in reasonably good working condition. It takes the better part of late morning and early afternoon to get all those vintage machines across the bridge.
“It’s pretty cool,” Bob said. “You kinda notice the bridge more than you do if you’re driving a car, even the color of the bridge, the towers, everything. The wind’s blowing because you’re a couple of hundred feet off the ground. There’s usually a pretty good breeze and sometimes it gets pretty cold up there.”
Bob got the idea for a vintage tractor parade over the Straits of Mackinac all the way back in 2008.
“I just wondered if people would want to cross the bridge on tractors,” Bob remembers. “There had been parades of semi-trucks, motorbikes, Corvettes, why not tractors. So I wrote the Mackinac Bridge Authority and they said nobody had ever presented the idea. They were pretty receptive. That first year we had 614 vintage tractors cross it.”
They’ve been holding the event every year since.
Once they cross the bridge from Mackinaw City, the tractor drivers continue through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula town of St. Ignace, for other festival events, games, and food — with those gleaming vintage tractors at the center of it all.
“One lady I talked to, I asked her how many people came and watched grandpa cross on the tractor. She said it was her father’s tractor back in 1943. She showed me a picture of herself when she was eight years old, and her sister and her mom and dad when they bought their tractor. I asked her, ‘How many people came to watch grandpa drive across?’ and she says, ‘twenty-three of us came to watch him cross it.’ Just one guy, one tractor, but 23 family members came to watch it.”
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