A tale of ingenuity
The Frutchey family created a make-shift raft that they used to bring over a John Deere combine and David Brown tractor in the summer of 1982.
Courtesy photo
The 1955 John Deere combine went across the river with few issues in the summer of 1982, as the farming couple created their own raft out from an old dock and barrels.
MEDIMONT — “On a beautiful summer day in the early 1980s, a young farm couple was about to float farm equipment across the Coeur d’Alene River at the Medimont landing. No one had taken anything big across the river there since the ferry had gone out many decades earlier.”
This recollection of a time past comes from Burr Frutchey, a farmer, husband and father, writing about his memories of successfully floating farm equipment across the river in 1982.
The family had recently purchased an old farm along the river years before but discovered that the native grass could not grow properly.
“The native grass had adapted to the heavy metals, poor soil nutrients, and periodic flooding and was in demand for reclamation,” Frutchey wrote.
To solve this problem, the couple leased some land from the Idaho Department of Fish and game, so they would be able to harvest more of the grass seed, but the old, long abandoned fields took a lot of work to access.
Frutchey and his wife had been through a lot together and believed that there wasn’t a problem too big that they couldn’t figure out — so they put their heads together and devised a plan, eventually realizing they could attempt ferrying the equipment across the river themselves.
Frutchey explained that he met his wife when they both signed on with the International Voluntary Service in the 60s, as described in his writing, “It was rumored that the couple had volunteered numerous times in the 1960s to do humanitarian work in various danger zones in Indo-China during the Vietnam War, so apparently they weren’t averse to risks, or maybe they just lacked common sense.”
Frutchey won’t tell you exactly what he did during the war — but a gleam in his eye will tell you that he was never one to shy away from an adventure.
Of course there was an alternative route that required transporting the equipment to the top of Fourth of July Pass and then down an old service road, but surely, crossing the river would be faster.
But first they had to build the barge.
They used an old dock on the bank’s side as the base.
“We built a makeshift barge out of the old dock,” explained Frutchey in an interview with the Shoshone News-Press, “I latched 17 barrels unto the side to get more floatation.”
A crowd gathered around as they began, ready to witness whatever happened next, whether success or failure.
The first item ferried was an old ’55 John Deere combine, successfully brought over without mishap. After that, however, the tractor was a different story.
“I remember after we loaded the heaviest piece, the tractor, and we got out into the river, the boards started bending, and I thought it was going to snap, or buckle,” Frutchey said. “But we had some planks that we used to load, so we just abandoned the outboard motor, just let it drift. We put the planks in front of the wheels and I drove up unto the planks and it spread the weight so it didn’t dump us. And we got all the way over there.”
While the adventures of that day will never be forgotten by any of the Frutchey brood, it was also the one and only time they ever attempted it.
The crop of grass seed was then harvested that fall by the family,
“The yield was moderate,” Frutchey wrote. “But the price was good, so the farm couple was able to enjoy a small profit for their work. A lot of the grass seed was sold to Japan for their expanding dairy business, where grazing was on marginal mountain lands. And everyone lived happily ever after.”
