Montgomery Wards Wagons

I recently purchased this wagon from a neighbor. Got me to thinking back in the corn picking days nearly every farm had one or more. Now you very seldom see any. Rod.

Shoveled a lot of oats off one like it as a kid.

Nice looking wagon! What shape is the floor in?

The floor is excellent, has always been in shed.

Never any used around me. All wagons were flat bed with sideboards that the sideboards were put on for grain but taken off for hay or straw bales. To have different wagons for different jobs just did not make any sence. With them you had to have a hoist and grain drag for unloading where with the flat beds you just shoveled the load off. Then came the hopper beds and then it did make sence to have different wagons for different crops. For forage those same flat beds were used but with taller sideboards. This was before the self unloading forage wagons. I have a wood flair box bed made in Minnesota that got down here to ohio and the way it is made no way could you shovel corn out of it. The old box beds from horse days the back end gate came out and a different one went on that became a shovel board and gave you a place to stand on to start shoveling from. The flair boxes what few I have seen were not made for that. Those old box beds did not hold much grain either. And the flair box would hold about half as much grain as a flat bed with sideboards. So capacity along with the unloading problems no body wanted one, And I grew up in the 50's before hopper beds or self unloading forage wagons but with a lot of wood wheel wagons around with a lot of them having the wood wheel taken off and rubber tires put on. Or car axles put under.

Rod, Nice looking gear and box!! That style of wagon box is called a flare box. I live and grew up in southeast Minnesota where I was at the end of the ear picking era. My dad retired from farming in the mid 1990s and he picked ear corn right up to the end. From what I remember, there were a mix of barge box-flare box-gravity wagons still being used on the farms in my area. We had barge box wagons. I still have a small variety of these wagons I use for helping out a local farmer in the fall because he still picks ear corn. In the photo are one flare box and 4 barge box wagons I own. These five were made by the prisoners at the state prison in Minnesota back in the day. I do have two Heider barge wagons along with two gravity wagons.
There were quite a few different companies out there that made flare and barge box wagons along with many different companies that made running gears.

I have 2 of the OLD time box wagons. Ones a JD with only one side board, and its on a ensilage chopper running gear. The other is a iron wheeled high wheeled standard side box wagon. I picked corn with the last wagon.

Sweet I also have a wagon like the the middle one in your pic

Do you have a Minnesota 1262 barge wagon? Or do you have a barge wagon the same size as the one in the middle? Where are you located?

Farmall 656,
I have a Minnesota flare box exactly like the one you have on the extreme left side of the picture. I had to put a new oak floor in and the graphics are more faded than yours but it works great behind my AC Model 35 one-row picker. But don't tell any of my fellow Wisconsin neighbors I have something associated with Minnesota! Lol