Russell & Company

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A new four-story brick warehouse 250 feet long was built out of this chaos, and by 1880, the company was one of the largest manufacturing plants in the west, covering seven acres, with their own railroad sidetrack. They employed 425 people.

Russell Steam Traction Engines

Surprisingly, almost nothing is mentioned about when the Russell brothers starting making Russell steam traction engines. One reference says they started shortly after their 1878 incorporation.

Of course, the company was busy making its many various other products: threshers, horsepowers, railroad cars, sawmills, feeder knife grinders, etc., but it seems odd that the history is blank about the product for which they’re known best.

So little is known about the company and the building of their portable steam engines, stationary automatic steam engines and road rollers until that fateful May night in 1898 (one reference says 1899), when the Russell business burned for the third time in their history. During this time they began making Russell stationary engines and spun off the Russell Engine Co. to manufacture them.

By 1909, the plant covered 21 acres and had produced 18,000 farm, traction and stationary engines, as well as 22,000 threshing machines. They also made sawmills, pneumatic stackers, feeders and steam road rollers.

The early Russell steam traction engines were prized for their simplicity and ease of repair. “All moving parts,” writes Jack Norbeck in Encyclopedia of American Steam Traction Engines, “were in plain sight, and any parts needing adjustments were within easy reach of ordinary tools.”

Like so many of the steam traction engines, the Russells were behemoths: the smallest one they produced in 1912, the 8 HP, weighed 9,000 pounds without the 60 gallons of water it could hold.

In 1909, Russell entered the gas tractor race, building a 3-cylinder machine that was not of its own design, but actually adapted from a British tractor. “Dubbed the ‘American’,” writes C. H. Wendel in his Encyclopedia of Farm Tractors, “its three 8-by-10-inch cylinders developed 44 brake horsepower,” although only 22 were delivered at the drawbar. Russell tractors were solidly built, like all of their products, but not particularly innovative and that perhaps cost them part of the market share.

They built tractors with some of the earliest cabs, mortised and tenoned wood of matched lumber, bolted together and costing $100 extra. The cab had windows and sashes.

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