The 25 five per
cent. payment was, by the way, not touched by us until after the entire
contract was completed: we deposited it in a kind of trust fund.
The tractor works was not ready to go into production. The Highland Park
plant might have been adapted, but every machine in it was going day and
night on essential war work. There was only one thing to do. We ran up
an emergency extension to our plant at Dearborn, equipped it with
machinery that was ordered by telegraph and mostly came by express, and
in less than sixty days the first tractors were on the docks in New York
in the hands of the British authorities. They delayed in getting cargo
space, but on December 6, 1917, we received this cable:
London, December 5, 1917.
SORENSEN,
Fordson, F. R. Dearborn.
First tractors arrived, when will Smith and others leave? Cable.
PERRY.
The entire shipment of five thousand tractors went through within three
months and that is why the tractors were being used in England long
before they were really known in the United States.
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