Newsletter

The Empire Tractor Newsletter is published three times a year and is available to anyone owning or interested in the history and preservation of the 1946 to 1949 Empire Tractor. Our goal is to provide tractor owners and readers with the information needed to correctly restore and preserve this unique farm tractor. We welcome any information pertaining to this tractor and provide an avenue to exchange information among members.

Each Newsletter consists of approximately 14 color pages, included periodic supplements such as Membership Listings, Serial Number Listings, and specification updates. To date, we have over sixty-five reproduction and NOS parts, literature, and manuals available to our members. Each year we hold an EMPIRE EXPO where our club is featured at a major show somewhere in the USA.

That certainly is a fair question and I’ll try to give you a short answer.

I used to own a small company called Empire Agri-Systems, so when I saw my first Empire Tractor at a car show in Albany, Georgia in 1991 I just had to have one. I finally located two near Fillmore, NY with the help of Wayne “Bump” Hamilton who operated an old tractor museum in Cuylerville about 30 miles south of Rochester. Using the two, I was able to end up with one real nice Empire that we used at local trade shows as kind of a company mascot. It sure drew a lot of attention.

As my interest in this unique tractor grew, I began to wonder how many tractors were made? How many still exist? What is the history of this company? Prince Stevens from Gardiner, ME provided me with a list of Empire owners he had come across over the years and with this I was able to get the club started.

To date we have over 190 members in over 39 states, six provinces of Canada, Argentina and South Africa. We have located over 380 Empire tractors and keep track of them by serial number. We believed in the beginning that this was a very rare tractor, but as it turns out, an estimated 6,663 tractors were made in the short life span of the company from late 1946 until early 1950.