A trencher pioneer. George W. Parsons
Published in: Construction Equipment
Date: 1/1/1999
By: Landberg, Lynn
George W. Parsons was one of the pioneers in manufacturing trenching machines. His first and smallest trencher was built in 1905, after which his trencher grew larger through the years. The biggest trencher, the 355, is capable of digging a 25-ft trench and was designed for pipe trenching. His company was sold several times, ending up with Seaman-Maxon. The last trencher under the Parsons name was manufactured in 1984.
George Parsons began building trenchers in 1905. Although his company was sold several times, his name endures
One of the pioneers in the manufacturing of trenching equipment was George W. Parsons, who began building trenchers in 1905 and soon was offering some of the smallest and largest trenchers around.
Parsons’ first trencher was a ladder trencher, or ditcher, so called because buckets were attached to a continuous chain, giving it the appearance of a ladder. The ladder assembly was lowered into the ditch, the chain turned, the buckets filled and the material was carried topside and discharged onto a side conveyor for dumping alongside the trench or into a truck. The counterpart of the ladder ditcher was the wheel trencher. The main difference was that the buckets on the wheel trencher were attached to a large wheel, which lowered into the ground and turned to fill the buckets.
After his first trencher, Parsons wasted no time in developing ever-larger machines. In 1906, he had a ladder ditcher that could open a trench 12 feet deep and 2 feet wide. The following year, he introduced a trencher that could dig 20 feet deep and 5 feet wide. Later, Parsons would add a line of wheel trenchers.
Parsons’ largest trencher was the 355, which came out in 1964. It was a ladder trencher capable of digging to 25 feet. Designed for pipe trenching, the machine had a curved bottom to conform the trench to the pipe’s curvature. The ladder on this machine was equipped with longitudinal rotating picks to trim the trench wider than normal dimensions.
Parsons’ company went through a number of changes over the years. In 1929, it was purchased by Koehring, becoming pan of the National Equipment Corporation (NEC). NEC was dissolved in 1931, but Parsons remained part of Koehring. In 1976, Koehring divided Parsons and sold it to two companies. Seaman purchased the small, rubber-tired end of the trencher line. In 1978, Seaman changed its name to Seaman-Parsons and purchased the Digz-All trencher line. This gave Parsons a complete line of trenchers from 8- to 95-hp units. Today, trenchers under the Parsons name are manufactured by Seaman-Maxon of Milwaukee.
The big-trencher end of the Parsons line was sold by Koehring to Trenchliner. In 1980, the Parsons line went to Michael Kukla International. The last of the big Parsons trenchers left the factory in 1984.
An interesting sidelight to the Parsons story was George Parsons’ early partner, EL. Maytag. The two of them built an attachment for threshing machines before they split up and Parsons went into the trencher business. Maytag went on to establish a line of washing machines – and the rest, as they say, is history.
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