"old 79" is a "Dain" John Deere (1918) found in Minnesota, the owners weren't aware of it's historic significance

Images found on http://forums.yesterdaystractors.com/viewtopic.php?t=851953

The Dain, which pre-dates John Deere’s first 2-cylinder tractor (the 1923 Model D), was put on permanent display at the John Deere Collectors Center in Moline, Ill., March 13, 2004.

Joseph Dain – a company vice president, board member and head of the patent and experimental department – began work on an “efficient, small-plow tractor” in 1914. Building on the failed attempt by C.H. Melvin, and later Max Slovsky, to develop a 3-bottom motor plow a few years before, Dain set to work on his own model.

Unfortunately, Dain died of pneumonia on Halloween 1917 after spending a wet, cold week field-testing the tractor, just before the Dain’s production began. Even as the first 100 Dain tractors were built, Deere Co. bought the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Co., which manufactured both stationary engines and tractors. Deere  Co. suddenly had no reason to continue developing the Dain, and quickly fell in love with the Waterloo Boy kerosene-burning tractor, which was more affordable, equally advanced and already successfully in production.

The Dain was well-advanced, sporting features that John Deere tractors didn’t utilize until the 1960s and some not even until the 1980s. Many of those features include a gear-driven water pump, key ignition, on-the-go shifting, shiftless speed changing and positive traction. These features, however, made the Dain too expensive for most farmers to afford its $1,500 price tag.

This particular Dain tractor’s history started like any other. Emil Obitz of Stockton, Minn., bought the tractor from a John Deere dealer in Winona, Minn., in 1918. He used it for about a decade until he traded it for a Model D in 1928. The receiving dealership’s owner, in turn, loaned the Dain to his brother, who used it for a year then parked it in the trees because of an engine malfunction.

In 1930, Morris and Erwin Timm, who lived in rural Minnesota, purchased the Dain. The Timms bought it for the tractor’s chains, with which they wanted to repair a feed mill. Evidently, the brothers never got around to using the chains, and the Dain languished outdoors until 1962 when Frank Hansen purchased it for $1,000.

Hansen had known about the tractor’s whereabouts as a boy, and after he returned from military service, he researched and confirmed the special nature of the Dain. Hansen then restored the neglected Dain tractor from pure rust and displayed it at antique tractor shows until he died about a year ago.

text from  http://www.farmcollector.com/company-history/slipping-through-the-cracks-of-history.aspx#axzz37kDHjYwx

The John Deere company has an event every even numbered year in Moline, called the Gathering of the Green