One morning a few years back, Phyllis Lansdell looked out the kitchen window of her home in the hills south of Turner Valley. What she saw prompted her to call to her husband, “Doug, somebody has dropped off another tractor.”

That someone would intentionally leave a farm tractor at the Lansdell’s is not so unusual given Doug’s renown as a collector and restorer of antique farm equipment. Inside a purpose-built shed near the house, with a sign reading “Grandpa’s Toy Box”, reside 18 fully-restored examples of motive power that helped change the Canadian prairies into productive farmland. Some of these tractors...