The Banker Called His Barn Junk — When That Rusty Engine Started, a Collector Offered $250,000 Cash

In March of 1987, a young loan officer named Bradley Simmons drove his company BMW onto the Hendricks farm in Cedar County, Iowa, with one purpose: to get old man Hendricks to sign the foreclosure papers. The bank was owed twenty-three thousand dollars. The farm wasn't worth much—a hundred sixty acres of mediocre land, a farmhouse that needed a new roof, and a barn full of what Bradley called "junk." He'd walked through that barn himself, seen the rusted equipment, the old tractors, the massive iron engine covered in fifty years of dust and pigeon droppings. "Mr. Hendricks," Bradley had said, smirking in his thousand- dollar suit, "there's nothing in that barn that would bring fifty dollars at a scrap yard." He was wrong. That "junk" was a 1903 Fairbanks-Morse 25-horsepower hit-and-miss engine—one of fewer than a dozen still in existence. What Bradley Simmons didn't know was that Harold Hendricks had made a phone call the night before. And the man walking up the driveway at that very moment was one of the most respected antique engine collectors in the Midwest, carrying a briefcase with two hundred fifty thousand dollars in cash. The look on Bradley's face when Harold fired up that engine—when the massive flywheels started turning and the barn shook with seventy-year-old power—is still talked about in Cedar County today. This story draws from real agricultural history of the 1980s farm crisis. Characters and dialogue are dramatized for storytelling. Have you ever seen someone underestimate something priceless? Share your story in the comments. #OldFarmTales #HitAndMissEngine #FairbanksMorse #AntiqueEngine #FarmCrisis