JR Pearson knows the rare satisfaction of completing a collection. As owner of The Barns museum in Marcus, Iowa, he recently acquired the last horse-drawn John Deere sickle-bar mower – a one-horse mower – that he needed to complete his display of a full line of Deere mowers.
One-horse mowers are more rare and therefore more difficult to find than two-horse models. Typically, they were used for maintenance tasks, such as mowing a lawn. JR spent a few years finding one that was affordable and in good enough condition to merit restoration.
Horse-drawn sickle-bar mower use began shortly after the American Civil War in the 1860s and continued for decades. According to Lynn R. Miller’s The Horsedrawn Mower, the earliest sickle-bar mowers began to appear in about 1845. Early mower brand names included Whitely’s, Walter A. Wood, J. Cumming and C. Aultman & Co.
