Ralph Puncochar’s Historic Collection Of Tractors, Cars, and Equipment To Be Sold This Saturday

Out on River Road, right at the edge of Hillsboro’s urban growth boundary, a barn full of green-and-yellow history is about to change hands.  This weekend, Hillsboro farmboy and longtime collector Ralph Puncochar is auctioning off a lifetime’s worth of restored John Deere tractors, antique farm implements, and a handful of vintage cars, the product of more than six decades spent chasing, buying, and rebuilding machines that trace the story of farming in Washington County.

Preview days ran today (Thursday) and Friday at the Puncochar farm (5888 SW River Road); the main event goes Saturday, with bidding open in person and online through Kilgore Auctioneers and Appraisers at highbid.com.

 Puncochar, a 1967 graduate of Hillsboro High School, grew up on a filbert orchard in south Hillsboro, on Larson Road past Meriwether Golf Course, out toward Scholls. He bought his first tractor at 19, a machine he says he “didn’t have any money to work on,” but bought anyway because “it just looked good.”

The pull toward John Deere ran in the family. His father ran Deere tractors on the farm, and Puncochar says the distinctive pop of a Deere engine, different from any other tractor, stuck with him for life. That love eventually landed him a job at Hillsboro Implement, the local John Deere dealership then owned by Roy Hofer and Dave Edwards, who took the young farm kid under his wing and taught him to work on the machines.

Hillsboro Implement itself is long gone, absorbed through a string of buyouts, first by Fisher, later by Pape, a small footnote in the broader consolidation of the region’s ag equipment dealers. Fittingly, two tractors in Saturday’s sale come from the Edwards family itself: Dave Edwards’ grandsons are consigning the last of their grandfather’s tractors, closing out that chapter alongside Puncochar’s own collection.

The collection spans tractors from a 1929 model, green with yellow trim, the earliest in the sale — up through machines from the 1960s.  Auctioneer Kent Gilgore says the vast majority still run; only two are being sold as non-runners. Four of the tractors are ones Puncochar used to compete with at the tractor pull in Banks.

The sale isn’t limited to tractors. Antique farm implements, flails, spreaders, and other equipment are also up for bid, along with several vintage automobiles. The standout is a 1929 Ford Model A that Puncochar hot-rodded himself, dropping in a Chevrolet 350 engine and transmission, a Ford 9-inch rear end, and Ford Pinto rack-and-pinion steering. It’s a car with no exterior door handles; you need the fob to get in, and on preview day, a man who’d owned it two decades earlier recognized it and remembered it fondly. He told Puncochar he’d be back Saturday to bid on it.

The entire auction is being run with no reserve, meaning some pieces could go for a steal while others, the ones “hot on somebody,” as Gilgore put it, could climb well past expectations.

Ralph, who has spent decades in construction and has seen plenty of estate sales for families left sorting through a lifetime of accumulated belongings, decided to get ahead of that problem himself. After he passed 75, his wife raised the question directly: what happens to the collection if something were to happen to him, when she “doesn’t know one tractor from another”? It took a couple of years to work up to it, but the answer was this auction.

He’s careful to note his wife never pushed him to sell — she takes as much pride in the collection as he does. It was his own call, made so the collection wouldn’t become a burden rather than the source of pride it’s been for most of his life.

He says his hope for the auction was that it be more than just another farm equipment sale. He wants a send-off that reflects the scale of what he’s built. He’s asked for drone footage of the event, saying he wants to be able to watch it years from now, “in my retirement bed,” as the tractors roll out to their new homes across Washington County and beyond.  The Herald referred him to a local media master and drone pilot, Kole of Hillsboro-based Kosen Media, who will capture the day on film from the ground and above to make sure the tractors and cars are never forgotten.

If you go: Preview days go through tomorrow at 4 Pm; the live auction is Saturday at the Puncochar farm on River Road, near the edge of Hillsboro’s urban growth boundary. Bidding is also now open for each item through the closing date, remotely via Kilgore Auctioneers and Appraisers at highbid.com.