“Other than my wife,” Jack Pace said, “that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Pace was talking about his 1948 Farmall H tractor, its red paint glistening in the afternoon sun at his shop and home on Oak Ridge Road.

The tractor, made by International Harvester, is in mint condition, but it wasn’t like that when Pace got it six years ago. It hadn’t run for about 30 years and sat unprotected other than by the shade of the trees.

Pace had wanted an H for years, and on election day in 2002, at Redditt’s Store, he asked Eddy Henry if he knew of anyone who had an H.

Henry’s brother, Robert, had one. And, when he came in late in the day to vote, Pace asked if he wanted to sell it. No, Henry said, but Pace could have it. Another neighbor, Robert Ashley, hauled it for him at no charge. The tractor was unloaded near the house where Pace planned to leave it until he could start dismantling and pressure-washing it.

“It was a good while before I even touched it,” he said. “Then I got serious.”

Two thousand hours later, plus about $3,500 in parts, and he was through.

He began in the summer of 2003, cleaning every part of the tractor as he meticulously dismantled it. Some parts, such as the settlement bulb, had to be cleaned with dental picks.

“I would clean, prime and paint,” Pace said, then he hung the parts by pieces of wire where the fresh red paint “made them look like a Christmas tree.”

When dry, he placed them in order on the floor of a shed, ready to go back into place as he re-assembled the tractor.

“I don’t restore; I rebuild,” Pace said, adding that the project “increased my patience a thousand fold.”

By the summer of 2004, Pace was about through with the project except for one thing — he had forgotten the valve settings, and no matter whom he asked, no one seemed to know.

“Then a light bulb came on in my head and I remembered the settings.” He set the valves but didn’t try to crank it because “I didn’t think it would crank anyway. I was negative.”

One day his neighbor and friend since childhood, Billy Brent, came over and suggested they crank it. Pace stalled as long as he could, but when he hit the starter it turned over one time, fired up and died.

“I adjusted the carbuerator, and it hasn’t slowed up since,” Pace said.

Pace’s interest in tractors is lifelong, and when he was a kid he had a couple of toy tractors “not like you see today, because now they’re all over the place. I was always fascinated with the International Farmall, the McCormick models.”

In the summer, three of them, pulling big trailers of hay, would pass the Pace home. He thought they were the smoothest-running tractors he had ever heard and thought that one day maybe he could get one.

“And all these many years later, in 2002, I got that one,” he said. “I have me a prize.”

He was about 5 or 6 years old, in 1955, Pace said, “when they paved that road out there for the first time. I’d go down there on that little knoll of dirt on the old place and sit there and watch the Turnapulls and road graders, and the foreman for the job would pay me 25 cents a day to watch. I developed a love of machinery then.”

He credits a neighbor, John Ward, for getting him interested in the mechanics. Ward, who lived next door, left his tillers and lawn mowers outside in the rain and cold every winter telling Jack, “It won’t hurt a thing.”

“Who was calling me the next spring to come help him get his equipment running?” Pace said. “I learned to work on machinery, small engines especially, and developed my love for it right there from John Ward.”

Pace was excited when his uncle, Billy Pettway, bought a tractor and all the equipment in 1961 for $300. It was a long time before Pettway let Pace on the tractor because he was too young, but when he did, “He had me hooked.”

In Pace’s meticulously-clean and neat shop, he’s working on a 1968 International Cub “that is close to running” and is also rebuilding a John Deere “which is in better shape now, disassembled, than it was when I got it. I’d like to have it running again, but it’s hard to motivate myself because I’m so used to a smooth-running, vibrating-free tractor.”

Though there were about 900 tractor companies in the United States from 1890 until 1962, only several survived. It only takes a few minutes to know that Pace’s favorite is the International Harvester that made Farmall, a company that consolidated with Case.

“International came out with a letter series, I think back in the ’20s,” Pace said. “For example, there was the A, the Super A, and so on. In the early 1950s, they switched to a numbering system. The H was produced from 1939 until about 1953. The same tractor at one time had lug wheels instead of rubber tires.”

The company developed the first row-crop tractor in the ’20s, “and it caught on. The International Farmall was THE tractor of the 20th Century –bar none,” Pace said.

Pace and his wife, Rebecca, live on part of his family’s old home place. He majored in history at Mississippi College and taught for almost 30 years at his alma mater, Warren Central, then for several years at Porters Chapel and sometimes tutors at Dana Road where Rebecca teaches.

He said he would like to see a tractor organization in Warren County where interested people could come together, exchange ideas and share problems.

Tractors, he thinks, are works of art but advises anyone who wants to start rebuilding one to avoid one with a cracked block, dangling wires or a rusted-out hood: “Leave it alone. You’ll end up with a headache. I don’t fool with junk.”

It’s a very serious hobby, he said, and can get expensive.

Of his Farmall H, he said, “It may not be perfect, but I think I could win a trophy on that one. I did it myself. I couldn’t part with it. Nobody could afford it.”

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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.