Minneapolis-Moline dates back to the Candee & Swan Plow Company of Moline, Illinois, founded in 1865. It became Moline Plow Company (later, Moline Implement Company), a major Midwestern producer of tilling equipment: plows, harrows and other tools for sowing grain crops.
The Minneapolis Threshing Company began in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in 1874, and settled in Hopkins, Minnesota, in 1887. It concentrated on equipment for the last stage of small grain production: threshing.
Minneapolis Steel and Machinery Company, founded in 1902, began by making heavy construction equipment and steam engines, then moved into vehicles, including tractors (the Twin City line, 1912) and buses. Its chief executive, Warren C. MacFarlane, engineered the 1929 merger of the three companies and became president.
The merger produced a company that served farming tasks year-round: tilling, planting, weeding, harvesting and processing. Such integration was needed to compete with industrial giants like John Deere and International Harvester. All three of the constituent companies made or had made tractors. After the merger the company trimmed tractors to a single line, Twin City, made in Minneapolis. Harvesters and, later, combines, were built in Hopkins, also the company’s headquarters; tilling equipment was made in Moline.
In its first full year of operation, 1930, Minneapolis-Moline earned a profit of slightly more than one million dollars on sales of about $13,500,000. Then two catastrophes struck. The Depression devastated farm country; farmers stopped buying equipment. Then, in September 1932, Warren MacFarlane was seriously injured in a car crash. He spent five months hospitalized, partially paralyzed. By 1933, sales had fallen to $2,336,000, producing losses of over $1,500,000 and a reduction of employees from over 3,000 to just 672. Losses grew to over $2,000,000 in 1934.
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