Rouch brings his farming past back to working order

In the 1980s, Pulaski County farmer Terry Rouch made a name for himself in the farm toy collecting world for his scale models of equipment he had grown up with on his family farm. Rouch’s innovation was not to recreate tractors, but rather the implements those tractors pulled. His initial inspiration came from seeing some of the old toys that had meant so much to him as a child. They were lying in a junk pile and Rouch recalled, “I felt bad.” Soon he was making scale models of various implements and found he was also learning something in the process. “If you make a scale model of something, then you understand how it really works.”

However, after 30 years of model making, he said, “My eyesight got to the point where I had to give it up.”

But he still had the old equipment, such as wagons, plows, manure spreaders and more. “I had always toyed with the idea of fixing up our old John Deere wagon, so when I reached my 70s I pulled the running gear into my shop and studied the problem.

“You can’t buy much off the shelf for something built in 1960, so the challenge was to make it yourself. For example, if you need two red oak sills — 3-feetby-6-feet, 14 feet long — for your wagon, you’re going to have to know the guy who runs the local sawmill.

“If the back beater on your spreader is missing, you’re going to get to know your local junk yard guy. You’re going to learn how to weld. You’re going to look at problems a whole new way.

“Like they say, ‘It’s a journey.’ So I almost look forward to the next problem, the next step in bringing back to life a tool not used for 50 years.”

Rouch grew up on a family farm near Royal Center. “It was a typical 1950s farm with cattle, hogs and chickens. We grew corn, soybeans and wheat.”

Rouch’s most recent project was a 1940s manure spreader he pulled out of a fence row. The implement is again “mechanically sound,” he said. Another

Continued on page 15