Heck, have 1,000 of them. If you’re 83-year-old Lawrence Lord, proprietor of Lawrence Lord’s Old Farm Museum in Alexander, there is no such thing as too many tractor seats. The retired patriarch of a family well-drilling business, Lord has amassed a collection of iron tractor seats that he diligently scrapes, repaints, and displays in vivid grids on the walls of his two-barn museum — and also on the sides of his wooden travel trailer, where hang (at last count) some 340 of his finds.
It’s a wonder the thing still rolls, but when we caught Lord on the phone earlier this summer, he’d recently towed it back from Florida, where he spends winters, loaded down with new finds for his museum. Old wagons, tractors, lanterns, arcane and rusty farm equipment — you name it, and Lord’s probably got a specimen or two in his crowded repository on the eastern end of the long, lonely stretch of Route 9 known as “The Airline” (he’s generally open weekends in the summer). We asked if he’d found any new tractor seats on his travels, and Lord declared he’d picked up three beauties.
“It’s what I was doing when you called,” he said. “Just about to start cleanin’ ’em.”