Thanks to the help of two good friends and talented mechanics, the Rev. Herman Edge is once again driving the family tractor.

The tractor, a 1946 2N Ford, has been in the family since 1948. For more than a year, Jim Silver and the Rev. Danny Flora, pastor of Slackland Baptist Church, worked to restore the tractor (without Edge’s knowledge) and presented Edge with the newly revitalized model at Leesburg Day 2007.

Since that time, Edge drove the tractor in Centre’s Fall Festival 2007 and has displayed in other shows as well. Most recently, he drove the tractor in the Rock Run Christmas Parade held Saturday, Dec. 22.

“When they had Leesburg Day, Danny called me on the phone and said ‘I want you to go to Leesburg Day with me. I will pick you up,”’ Edge said. “I thought, Well, if he is going to pick me up, I will go.’

When they arrived at the event, Edge said they began looking over the tractors on display. “We came around to this one,” said Edge. “I looked at it and told him things about it. It fit the description of mine. Eventually he told me, ‘That is your tractor.’ They restored it. And since then, it has been in the Fort Payne Fair, Piedmont Day, Sand Rock Day.”

“It was a shock,” said Edge. “I couldn’t believe it. I realized they had put a lot of time and money in it that I didn’t have. I told them, ‘I’m older than you are and it will be yours when I am gone.’”

Edge grew up on a 100-acre farm in the Driftwood area of Cherokee County, which is now under Weiss Lake. In 1947, Edge’s father sold his John Deere and began searching for a new N tractor.

“I can remember going to Rome and looking over the dealership,” said Edge. “They had one on display in the showroom. For some reason or another, I reckon there was a shortage or something. You couldn’t get them.

"In the spring of 1948, about March, it was time to think about doing some farming. We had to have a tractor and my daddy found that one on a car lot in Gadsden.”

This particular tractor, Edge said, was used on construction jobs for a short time.

“I don’t know how they came by the equipment to go with it or anything,” said Edge. “But he bought the tractor, which consisted of two disc turning plows, cultivator planters and a cutting hammer. He bought all of that for $2,000. One of our neighbors carried his truck down and they loaded the equipment on it. Daddy drove the tractor home from Gadsden up Highway 411.”

Said Edge, “He got home about dark, drove it up to the front of the house and we turned the front porch light on so we could see it.”

The tractor brings back fond memories for Edge.

“We used to go to the cotton gin in Cedar Bluff,” he said. “And we would come back through the covered bridge (Dyke’s Bridge). My brother and I would get to the top of that hill, kick that thing out of gear and turn it loose. You talk about taking a ride down a hill, we did!”

“But we didn’t think about that when we were 15 or 16 years old,” Edge. “One time we went to Cedar Bluff carrying a bale of cotton. It was close to nighttime. My brother planned to go to a ball game. We got up there and the bales of cotton were lined up. He laid down in the top of the cotton went to sleep and missed the ball game!”

At the time, they didn’t have a tail light on the trailer, so his brother would ride in the back and shine a flashlight if another vehicle came by.

“We enjoyed it,” said Edge “I couldn’t wait to get home from school to use it. I would plow it before I went to school in the morning. I liked everything on the farm from picking peas to hoeing cotton.”

Edge recalled one memory that wasn’t so pleasant. In June of 1952, one of their neighbors, Ruby Stokes, drowned in a tragic accident.

She was the daughter of Fayette Stokes, the generous neighbor who helped Edge’s father haul their new tractor and equipment from Gadsden.

“There were no telephones or anything during that time,” said Rev. Edge. “We had no way of communicating. One of my neighbors came and told me. My dad and mother were gone. He and I got on the tractor and drove around through the community telling the neighbors and went to the post office to tell people that she had drowned.”

In 2000, Edge retired as director of missions for the Cherokee County Baptist Association. One of his first retirement projects was to restore the tractor. He and Jim Silver carried the tractor to Jim’s place and began the work. They disassembled the vehicle, had it sandblasted and bought new tires. Edge abandoned the project, however, after suffering a heart attack and later having bypass surgery.

Silver and Flora, however, were determined to complete Edge’s project.

Silver said he had to “keep his distance” from Edge at times for fear he would ask him about the tractor and spoil the surprise.

“We worked different times,” said Silver. “Brother Danny pastored a church on my way and he would stop by on his way to church duties.”

Silver, a retired instructor from Cherokee County Career and Technology Center, has worked on a number of tractors over the years.

“It was really a pleasure to get to work with Brother Danny,” said Silver. “And it was also a pleasure to present the tractor to Brother Herman.”

“Brother Danny is so talented,” said Silver. “He can do mechanical work, body work, any kind of work. He is such a skilled person and it was my pleasure to get to work with him. He could have done it by himself.”

“It was worth every minute of the work,” said Rev. Flora. “He (Edge) was speechless. He didn’t know what to say. There were several tractors at Leesburg Day. We just started walking through, looking at all of them and we came to this one, which was the only one there that would even be close to his. He looked at it. He said, ‘Yeah, that is kind of like one my dad had.’ He kept looking at it. I said, ‘Herman, you are not going to believe what I am about to tell you. That is your tractor.’ He just dropped his head. He didn’t know what to say. The next thing we knew, he was sitting on it and took off on it before we knew it.”

Said Flora, “He wanted to know, ‘How much do I owe you guys for all this?’ We told him, ‘It has all been paid for. It’s yours.”’

Flora’s father owned a body shop in Fort Payne.

“And I have fixed up a couple of cars in times past,” said Flora. “This is just kind of a hobby of mine. It is fun to me. I didn’t look on this as being a burden or work. And I am sure Jim is the same way. He is one of the better tractor mechanics around our county and a lot of people know him.”

Edge and his wife, Margaret, live in Leesburg.

Silver and Flora continue to wish Edge the best with his tractor.

“Why we waited all those years I don’t know,” Flora said. “We knew it would take a while. But I’m glad we could do it.”