Reliable is the one word Allen H.
Matz, Inc. would like people to
think of when they think of his
dealership.
“We only sell reliable equipment
that we can offer parts and service
for,” states Allen H. Matz, owner
of the New Holland Ford dealer
ship.
And reliable is exactly what they
have been since 1944, making them
Henry Ford Planned for
Tractor Before Automobile
A little known fact is that Henry
Ford began planning for the
tractor long before the automobile,
according to his autobiography,
“My Life and Work,’’ published in
1922.
His Model T was pouring off the
assembly lines by the hundreds of
thousands, however, before he
built in 1917 the world’s first mass
produced tractors and called them
Fordsons.
Influenced by his boyhood ex
periences on his father’s farm, he
began working as early as the
1880’s on a vehicle that might pull a
plow.
“I have walked many a weary
mile behind a plow and I know all
the drudgery of it,” he said. “What
a waste it is for a human being to
spend hours and days behind a
Stocky Ford 1000 Series tractors offer quality you can see. Big tractor features. High-capacity
hydraulics and efficient diesel engines. And they’re backed by a full-time, full-service dealer!
Ford 1910-215 PTO hp
Allen H. Matz,
one of the oldest individual dealers
in Lancaster County. Mr. Matz
started out at the 505 E. Mam
Street location as a salesman for
Snavely Farm Service but in 1944
he bought the operation from
them.
About 40 percent of the business
is farm oriented with the
remainder going to lawn and
slowly moving team of horses.”
He was fascinated by the heavy,
lumbering steam vehicles that
already had been built and tried to
improve them for “farm
locomotives.” His first ex
perimental model, built largely
from the remains of a mowing
machine, reportedly ran only 40
feet. He built other, more suc
cessful models but soon abandoned
them.
“I knew there was no difficulty
in designing a big steam tractor for
use on a large farm,” he said. “But
the manufacturing of a big tractor
which only a few wealthy farmers
could buy did not seem to me
worthwhile.”
His studies then turned to the
internal-combustion engine
which wasn’t weighted down by an
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PARE IT
TO FORD
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ALLEN H. MATZ, INC.
505 E. Main St. New Holland, PA 17557
PH: 7 H 7-334-2214
Serving The (Community Thirty-Five Veers ,
LANCASTER COUNTY’S OLDEST FORD DEALER
Fortl2lo-13 sPTOtip
a “Reliable” Ford Dealer
garden sales
Hesian Chow has been Matz’
mechanic for the last 13 years
while parts have been run by
Richard Seiverhng for seven
years. Ford has been part of the
Matz business for 35 years.
“We are a service oriented
agency,” he concludes, “and I
personally monitor the whole
operation.”
unwieldly boiler or water tank, and
which got is power directly from
the explosions of its vaporized fuel.
It was then, too, that he con
cluded the farmer “would be more
interested in something that would
travel on the road than in
something that would do work on
the farm.”
From that point on, he “prac
tically dropped work upon a
tractor until the automobile was in
production.”
“With the automobile on the
farms, the tractor became a
necessity,” he said. “For then the
farmers had been introduced to
power.”
By early 1917, he had turned out
more than 50 experimental trac
tors. Even then, he would not have
begun tractor production until
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Ford 2110-34 PTO lip v
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Ford Supplement to Lancaster Farming, Saturday, Juno 30,1984
Allen H. Matz parks a garden tractor in front of his
dealership at 505 E. Main St., New Holland, Pa. He's been a
Ford dealer for 35 years at the same location.
much later but for the influence of
World War I U-boats and air
planes.
Allied shipping headed for Great
Britain was being sunk at the rate
of half a million tons a month. To
survive, Britain had to increase its
own food productivity. Farm
mechanization appeared to be the
only hope.
Of several experiments con
ducted with tractors by the British
Royal Agricultural Society, two
Ford models were hailed as “a
lightning flash from the clear sky
of tractor engineering.”
The first Ford tractor for Britain
rolled off an assembly line at a
small plant at Michigan Avenue
and Brady Street in Dearborn,
Mich. Mr. Ford called it a “Ford
son,” a condensed form of the firm
name, “Henry Ford & Son.”
The Fordson proved durable and
reliable as well as economical.
More importantly, it helped speed
up British food production to such
an extent that one British
spokesman stated that without it,
“the food crisis would in all
probability not have been sur
mounted.”
Henry Ford then turned to the
American market in 1918 with his
new concept in light-weight, low
cost design. Within three months,
he was avalanched with 13,000
orders. He sold the early Fordson
for $795 and was able to cut the
price to a low of $395 a unit by 1922.
With the economies of mass
production placing the tractor
within the reach of the average
farmer, Fordson sales soared.
That was the beginning of an
organization that now ranks as one
of the world's largest tractor
producers. Today, the descendants
of the Fordson bear the name
“Ford” and are marketed
throughout the free world for the
same purpose that Henry Ford
foresaw as a boy.
Ford Synchromesh Transmission
161