page_title: Avery Company
section_title: Capitalization growth
hierarchical_section_title: Avery Company / Capitalization growth
caption_attribution_description: English: An Avery tractor pulling three sod cutters on a farm near Larned, Kansas around 1916.
context_page_description: The Avery Company, founded by Robert Hanneman Avery, was an American farm tractor manufacturer famed for its undermounted engine which resembled a railroad engine more than a conventional farm steam engine. Avery founded the farm implement business after the Civil War. His company built a large line of products, including steam engines, beginning in 1891. The company started with a return flue design and later adapted the undermount style, including a bulldog design on the smokebox door. Their design was well received by farmers in central Illinois. They expanded their market nationwide and overseas until the 1920s, when they failed to innovate and the company faltered. They manufactured trucks for a period of time, and then automobiles. until they finally succumbed to an agricultural crisis and the Depression.
context_section_description: In 1900 the company's stock was valued at US$1,000.000. In 1902, Avery purchased the Hannah Wagon Co., and it continued to grow until 1912 when it was valued at US$2,500,000. Cyrus Avery left active management of the company in 1902 and built a new home in Galesburg. In September, 1905, Cyrus M. Avery died. His son, George Luzerne Avery, had served as his father' secretary and was made a director of the company upon his father's death. George's uncle, J. B. Bartholomew, became president.
   The Avery company made many traction engines, such as the 1907 steam tractor model. At that time steam was the only form of power and the tractor resembled a miniature locomotive. In 1909, Avery began manufacturing gasoline tractors. They shortly gained a reputation for producing huge tractors, including the very large for its day 40 horsepower (30 kW) Avery steam traction engines, weighing 25 short tons (23 t) each. Large tractors were needed across the prairie from North Dakota to Texas to turn the virgin sod, often with roots as thick as a man's thumb, into tillable soil. Even teams of 16 horses were not strong enough to pull gang plows through the dense bunch grasses whose roots grew as deep as 6 feet (1.8 m) into the earth. The first small steam traction engines, adapted from the design of stationary engines used to thresh wheat and gin cotton, weren’t strong enough and broke down repeatedly.
  The competitive landscape changed during that same year, 1909, when the Holt Manufacturing Company of Stockton, California, arrived in Peoria. Holt, a builder of steam-powered harvesters and traction engines and already a leader in crawler tractors, purchased the bankrupt Colean Manufacturing Company, which had manufactured farm implements and steam traction engines across town. Holt established their eastern manufacturing branch there, under the name Holt Caterpillar Company—the predecessor to Caterpillar Inc..  In the same year, Avery's first tractor was a huge 60 horsepower (45 kW) model with a 12- by 18-inch bore and stroke. The competition included the 15-30 Model O Quincy tractor, made in 1911; the Fairbanks-Morse 15-25 of the same year and the 20-hp International Harvester Company Mogul of 1909. Unfortunately, their first tractor failed to perform, and they pulled it from the 1910 Winnipeg Tractor Demonstration.
caption: An Avery tractor pulling three sod cutters on a farm near Larned, Kansas around 1916.
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